THE ASSIGNMENT

A NEWSROOM THAT RUNS ON RECORDS NO ONE READS TWICE

State Affairs covers state government the way a wire service covers Washington — statehouse by statehouse, filing by filing. The raw material is public record: tax-credit disclosures, trooper payroll, utility surveys, campaign polling. Reliable, and almost never designed to be read.

State Affairs brought me on as a contract designer for six months to sit inside that pipeline — building the charts, maps, and covers the newsroom needed on deadline, and giving its sales team creative that could sell a coverage vertical without looking like a spreadsheet.

I reported to the company's chief of staff, and worked across three surfaces: the newsroom itself, its social channels, and the sales materials pitching advertisers and partners on State Affairs' coverage.

READING THE RECORDS

CHARTS BUILT TO BE FINISHED, NOT JUST GLANCED AT

Every chart started as a spreadsheet a reporter was already staring at. The job was deciding what the reader needed to see first — the gap between what a program promised and what it delivered, the line that crosses another line, the one county that's an outlier on the map — and building the rest of the chart around that single fact.

A POLLING FRANCHISE, SOLD IN FOUR PANELS

Howey Politics Indiana's signature vertical is called the Horse Race — its read on where a campaign actually stands, issue by issue. Selling that to a reader meant not opening with another chart. It meant a bench at the track, two people squinting at a blur, and a stranger passing over the one thing that fixes it.