Jennifer Peebles

Serve the newsroom with its data needs

• Find and obtain data and documents for stories
• Crunch numbers
• Clean up data
• Create databases as needed
• Create simple interactives with Tableau Public, Fusion Tables, CartoDB

Supervise digital production for an all-politics news website doing roughly 3.5 million uniques per month.

• Helped lead transformation of the Examiner from a six-day-a-week tabloid local paper to an all-politics news website in 2013
• Manage editors, web producers, video journalists and reporters
• Help direct coverage and coordinate production and publication of content from more than two dozen regular staff contributors
• Pushed organization to use more data visualizations, charticles, infographics, interactive maps and multimedia, including its first podcasts and narrated slideshows
• Supervise publication on web (desktop and mobile), production of tablet editions
• Edit content and supervise team of producers/editors to ensure high standards and proper quality control
• Liaise with corporate web development and IT staff to add functionality and features to site and troubleshoot problems
• Helped lead sitewide improvements in SEO that helped in doubling the percentage of overall site traffic from search

• Produced original enterprise and watchdog journalism that won one national award and multiple statewide awards
• Supervised accountability coverage of the Houston school system and edited my colleagues' work, including a series on insider contracts going to school board members' friends
• Used databases and computer records to find stories
• Helped break story that school district was planning to give a $600k no-bid contract to a school board member's friend (after which the contract idea quietly died)
• In-house expert on using freedom of information laws
• Led formation of our social media presence and helped build up our Twitter following to 3k+
• Produced GIS maps to find stories, including mapping wreck data to show wreck "hot spots" in Houston and San Antonio
• Produced interactive Google Maps, including a map mashup of Texas legislators' ethics forms that won a national award
• Created interactive social network charts to show connections between players in insider deals in local government
• Hosted podcast on open government issues
• Frequently hosted and co-hosted monthly Webinar on using open government laws
• Counseled journalists, citizen-journalists and others across Texas about using freedom of information laws to access public information

I was proud to work at Nashville's morning daily for 14 years.

• Supervised a team of five reporters covering local, state and federal government (2005-08)
• Oversaw newspaper's 2005 investigation that led to massive changes in the Tennessee Highway Patrol
• Oversaw newspaper's investigation into sexual harassment in state government, which led to changes in how the state deals with harassment cases
• Helped break story that led to the state legislature granting public access to a searchable database of legislative votes
• Used GIS mapping to show "hot spots" of home foreclosures and car thefts in the Nashville area
• Helped coordinate breaking coverage of the 2005 Operation Tennessee Waltz bribery sting arrests
• First person in the newsroom on Twitter and started the first news-side blog
• Stints as night/weekend regional editor, then state editor
• Supervised three reporters embedded with the Army's 101st Airborne Division (two did stints in Iraq and one in Afghanistan)
• Stints as "storm team" editor (for severe weather and major breaking news) and 1A Sunday digest editor
• Started as a summer intern, left when I was government and politics team leader