Um Yes, Hello ...

I'm Brandon (he/him), an investigative journalist specializing in applying computational techniques to watchdog and data-heavy journalism projects. Currently I'm a news applications developer at ProPublica. Before that, I spent many years consulting for news organizations locally, nationally and internationally. You can find some of my work here.

I'm interested in journalism technology research, which has led me to write an introductory course about the responsible use of AI for journalism with the London School of Economics and Political Science, develop an experimental automated web scraping tool and present at the Computation + Journalism Symposium, the Data Science+Journalism Workshop and at NICAR. Got a wild idea for an investigative project? Contact me! I love to collaborate.

I got my start in 2013, doing data journalism at The Austin Bulldog, an investigative nonprofit based in Austin, Texas. I wrote tools to automate routine investigative tasks like full background investigations of political candidates, scraped large datasets, and wrote distributed grid searches. I led the research on a 6-month local tax-evasion story (part1) (part2). Our work resulted in the recovery of hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes and a closure of the tax loop-hole. It was during this investigation that I first saw the power of applying new techniques to old journalistic problems. That same year I was a finalist in the CIJ/IRE’s "Follow the Money" campaign finance data mining contest and attended my first NICAR conference in Louisville, KY. I slept on the roof of an abandoned building the first night because I was broke. Then it snowed. That's how badly I wanted to be there.

When I'm not near a computer, you can usually find me at Seattle 2600 or walking one of my dogs.

🔗 Contact

Email is the best way to contact me: brandon@bxroberts.org. If you prefer encrypted communications, my key is below. I'm also on bluesky, mastodon and X/twitter.

🔗 PGP Key

You can encrypt mail to me using my public key. (NOTE: I have a new key as of Nov 1, 2021 with ID 0x91ECCA231535C682. Here's a version of my new key signed with my old key, in case you have my old key and want to verify it.)