Published Oct. 22, 2018

California Dream

   About this project

The California Dream is a collaborative of nonprofit news and public radio outlets, including KPCC, based across the state. For this project, reporters and editors were working from Los Angeles, San Francisco and Sacramento to cover a story in Oakland.

This project told the story of the impact of California’s Prop. 13 through the lens of a single block in a middle-class neighborhood. The ambition here was to show just how much Prop. 13 has shaped the state and its communities. We tried to humanize its impacts using video, audio and print. By limiting our reporting to one block we attempted to demonstrate how pervasive Prop. 13’s effects have been — shaping the lives of nearly every Californian. These are stories you could hear on any block, almost anywhere in California.

We had the added challenge of needing to give our audience a sense of place without actually naming the block we were reporting from. So, we created detailed shots of our subjects in their homes and places of business. We told personal stories without revealing the specific location of our subjects. IN the digital build, I synthesized the video, photo, audio, data and narrative content to tell the stories in the most compelling way possible.

I adapted an audio tool that allowed playback of the radio stories with a running transcript, allowing mobile users or users unable to play or hear audio to experience the radio version of the story too. I used tax data and information from Google Maps to create an illustrated, interactive tax-rate “map” of the block — without using an actual map.

   My role

UI/UX design

Front-end development

Multimedia editing and production

Data analysis and visualization

   Awards

Radio Television Digital News Association's Regional Edward R. Murrow Award
Excellence in Innovation, 2019