Good evening, Chronicle.
Welcome to my journalism and software portfolio!
Notable places in my life
where I've lived
where I live now
where I want to be this summer
Scroll down!
First and foremost, I'm a journalist.
Journalism to me is a way to be a part of and serve a community, whether that means producing timely breakers or building relationships for intensive solutions and investigative pieces.
For the last two years, I’ve covered California AAPI politics and activism for The Yappie, a non-profit newsroom read by members of Congress, White House staff and advocacy leaders.
As News Editor of my college weekly, I assigned and edited 6-8 stories per week and trained over a dozen writers with my co-editors.
As an AAJA Voices Investigative Fellow this summer, I sharpened my investigative and data journalism skills learning from mentors from the LA Times, ProPublica and the Chronicle.
I'll bring this news sense and experience with me, and keep building it, as a Chronicle intern.
The Yappie
Preventing ‘double punishment’: Inside the campaign to end California’s prison-to-deportation pipeline
A solutions piece on a decade of organizing against the deportation of formerly incarcerated Southeast Asian refugees in California.
Funded by a Solutions Journalism Network Advancing Democracy grant
Cited by AAAJ-Asian Law Caucus and other advocacy orgs
The Student Life
Invasion of Ukraine weighs heavily on 5C community members with connections to the conflict
When Maria Lyven PO '22 asked her family how they were doing last week, her mother told her that she woke up to the sound of explosions.
AAJA Voices
Journalism’s influential awards lack diverse judges
A groundbreaking investigative finding that people of color are often still the only person of their race in the (judging) room.
Presented at AAJA's 2022 National Convention
Led to advocacy for change by LA Times Exec. Editor Kevin Merida, NAHJ President Yvette Cabrera and other news leaders
The Yappie
Voters oust San Francisco school board members in historic race that galvanized AAPIs
The city’s first Pacific Islander elected leader was one of three officials recalled in Tuesday’s high-stakes special election, which featured a surge in AAPI activism.
But I love using data and web tools to tell important and engaging stories.
It's one thing to hear about new COVID cases on campus in sporadic emails from administrators.
It's another to see dots representing cases fill up a dashboard, color-coded by school, updated every week, with historical data clearly graphed and accessible.
Digital tools open up myriad possibilities for not just informing community members, but empowering them to understand their own situations and make well-informed decisions or arguments.
I hope to continue exploring these possibilities and serving the San Francisco/Bay Area community with them as an intern at the Chronicle.
The Student Life
Data visualization: first-generation, Black student percentages drop in Pomona’s class of 2025
Pomona's most selective class to date is also its least diverse in several years.
Awarded Best Interactive Graphic of 2021 by the California College Media Association
The Student Life
The Cost of Increasing Costs: Accounting for tuition increases at the 5Cs
Investigative data piece visualizing eight years of school financial reports to explain why tuition consistently increases more than inflation.
The Student Life
5C COVID Tracker
Interactive dashboard that faculty relied on for decision-making in lieu of consistent administration reporting, and that exposed official counting errors.
Part of a package awarded Best COVID Coverage of 2021 by the California College Media Association
The Student Life
Data visualization: Pomona, Harvey Mudd admit 2026 classes with record diversity
With 61.4% domestic students of color accepted at Pomona and 70% at Harvey Mudd, the pools of admitted first years are on track to form the most diverse class profiles in both colleges’ histories.
Before journalism, building software was my jam.
React, Express, NextJS, Django, PHP, d3.js, pandas, MongoDB, PostgreSQL...you name it, I've probably at least played around with it at some point. I'm even teaching a web dev class at my school!
I love building webapps, and I'm good at building them fast. I built this entire portfolio you're seeing, d3-based globe and all, in six hours.
I maintain my own notetaking and social media platforms, and I've worked for a whole host of different startups and freelance clients.
On the data side, my team won runner-up at UCLA DataFest 2022, and I've been learning NLP on the side.
But it wasn't until AAJA Voices last summer that I worked with real data editors, and it was a thrilling experience — I became aware of visualization details and processes I (or my previous editors) never would have found otherwise.
I will bring my technical background with me as an intern, and would love to keep learning about data visualization and news engineering from mentors at the Chronicle!
Now I want journalism to be my future.
The first "real" story I ever pitched was about community organizing in San Francisco Chinatown, which came from me stumbling into a rally in Portsmouth Square.
Some of my most formative experiences happened in San Francisco. In many ways it's responsible for both my journalism and software careers.
I would love to return to San Francisco this summer as a Chronicle intern to continue my journey.
Thank you for your consideration ♥
References you can ask about me
Jasper Davidoff (jlda2018@mymail.pomona.edu), my Editor-in-chief at The Student Life
Rahul Mukherjee (r.mukherjee5@icloud.com), Hearst Interactives Editor and my editor at AAJA Voices
Andrew Peng (andrew.peng@theyappie.com), President of The Yappie