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Building the Wall

This is the project that landed me on the Storytelling Studio team. I was originally with a team called Local Developer Solutions Network (catch, huh?) and we were put to work on a large project taking an in-depth look at the U.S.-Mexico border and Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “Build the Wall.”

It was my job to set up the project using the Angular javascript framework, which I had learned while working on Presto, Gannett’s content management system. The work involved creating reusable components, templates, directives and services for the 15 or so stories written by network reporters, as well as pages for a compilation of short documentary videos, an interactive map page, a table of contents, a carousel of links to stories, and a page detailing how we went about compiling all of the information within and who contributed.

It was weeks of work, and the night it published stretched on till dawn as we tracked down and fixed bugs, but it was all worth it as the project won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018.