Joe Spurr

I help media organizations use new storytelling methods to inform the public and evolve the industry.

For Boston's NPR station, I braided several multimedia approaches to help track the Massachusetts drug lab crisis. A Polk-winning ProPublica reporter described our team's work as "tremendous" and a modern template for covering developing news.

I previously directed a Knight-funded project to foster open web access to local justice systems, piloted the front and back-end relaunch of San Diego's NPR station, investigated Tijuana drug cartel murders using XML map layers, and seeded the 2007 KPBS wildfire reportage methods acknowledged by a Mark Twain award, national meta coverage (e.g. Wired), and case studies by Google and Stanford University.

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My father is a software architect and my mother is a community organizer and former nurse. Our shared DNA could explain how my deep satisfactions usually involve human connection or solving puzzles.

My first love and fundamental background is print reporting and editing. I cut my teeth freelance reporting for The Boston Globe. I've since become a professional radio producer, photographer, and videographer. Nothing compares to a well-executed narrative, but I also agree with Clay Johnson that programmers are the new scribes.

I enjoy Django, jQuery, Final Cut, Lightroom, and Dropbox. Cumulative data journalism provides invaluable context over time, and we should all be tilling this soil. Accessibility remains important (and helps keep things machine-readable). Though it's become noisy, Twitter is still amazing and I'm optimistic about higher consciousness coming through the hivemind.

I love music, bicycles, tennis, massage, yoga, and my family — especially my beautiful wife and daughter.

I think it's important to remember that language has limits, gratitude is key, and we're here to help each other.

View more professional details at joespurr.cc/about