Hi, I'm a data reporter who covers state and local governments in Georgia. I started as a print reporter.
Print bylines and some data work in places like McClatchy's Georgia papers, Creative Loafing, SaportaReport, Atlanta Civic Circle and others.
Now I mainly do data visualizations, web-scraping and web apps. And good robots. For outlets like The Current GA. And sometimes still a bylined article still.
maggie.a.lee[ at ]gmail.com Phone or signal: 404-five three eight-2740
State legislative days turn into confused legislative nights. The Georgia General Assembly voted 996 times in 2024. More than a quarter of those votes were on two deadline days. For The Current.
Ingredients: Scraping, Datawrapper
Coastal Georgia's 2024 presidental election results presented by party, geography and scale for The Current.
Coastal Georgia votes for president
Ingredients: QGIS, Flourish
The Georgia Secretary of State's website was still leaking data after the office said it was fixed. For The Current.
Ingredients: Inspecting json files in browser console
Investigation into local property tax breaks for some of the county's richest entities. For The Current
Ingredients: Python, data-cleaning, csv, Flourish, QGIS
@GaPolBot monitors public Georgia and Atlanta public agency websites and RSS feeds and tweets what it finds.
Like, the governor's executive orders, Supreme Court of Georgia opinions and when new companies register to lobby in Georgia.
Ingredients: Python, scraping, civic bot, RSS
Data byline on a couple SaportReport stories for scraping, understanding and mapping Atlanta Airbnb data.
A snapshot of Atlants's Airbnb listings raises questions about regulation and affordability
Northern suburbs' Airbnb data show challenges of short-term rental regulation
Ingredients: Python, scraping, QGIS, Flourish
Experiment in visual storytelling in a tight CMS. Basically an icon bar graph with paragraphs between the bars.
Live version at Atlanta Civic Circle
Ingredients: Flourish, no-code chart, grouped symbol bar chart
Georgia lawmakers are above average in age and wealth. Brings together several data sources and experiments with telling the story as a quiz.
Live version at Atlanta Civic Circle
Ingredients: Python, scraping, data-cleaning, Flourish
Demographic dot-density map
Live version at Atlanta Civic Circle
Ingredients: Mapbox, QGIS
Graphics that explain "packing," "cracking" and other ways to manipulate district maps for political gain. Atlanta Civic Circle used these panels in social media.
Live version at Atlanta Civic Circle
Ingredients: Photoshop, Flourish, no-coding
Social media and contact info for state lawmakers. Click on a district to find yours.
Live version at SaportaReport.com
Ingredients: Leaflet, map, HTML
You need a chart to tell a story that has lots of numbers, like crime stats. That's doable in fairly little time with very little coding via Datawrapper, Flourish and other software. Great for any size publication.
Live version at Reporter Newspapers
Ingredients: No-coding or low-coding charts and graphs, Flourish
Map of election results and number of voters by county
Live version at SaportaReport.com
Ingredients: Datawrapper, csv
Map and list tracking where Atlanta's and Fulton's economic development agencies have authorized commercial property tax breaks, starting in 2019. Goes with ongoing reporting at SaportaReport.com.
Ingredients: Leaflet, Flask, Python, static page
If Georgia's budget were $1, health care and education would get quarters. Most other things would get pennies
With story at SaportaReport.com
Ingredients: D3.js, Excel
A personal project, just trying out a county map with the counties sized by 2016 population.
Ingredients: Cartogram, cartoram.js, D3.js, HTML, CSS
Another personal project, from 2016. I wanted to show what gets filed and handled in the Georgia Legislature. I wrote a little Python script to scrape, then categorize, these bills. D3.js did the heavy lifting on drawing the chart. It's finished and annotated in Photoshop.
Ingredients: Python, web scraping, D3.js, Photoshop
A chart created for the AJC in 2016, though that page has succumbed to link rot :(
Ingredients: D3.js, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, CSV
APC Workshop: Excel is for reporters, not just accountants (2017)
APC/SPJ Workshop: Eight newsroom hacks that don't require coding (2016)
How to schedule a Python script in a piece of cloud, using an Amazon AWS EC2 instance (a tiny virtual server) and cron (a scheduler that is built into it.) (2015)
