Ken
Schwencke

I am a journalist and developer living in New York City. Currently, I am the editor in charge of ProPublica’s data journalism teams.

Previously I worked at The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times.

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Selected Projects

  • You Can Now Search the Full Text of 3 Million Nonprofit Tax Records for Free

    Search the full text of nearly 3 million nonprofit IRS filings, including investments and grants given to other nonprofits

  • Deadnamed

    The way cops in Jacksonville and other jurisdictions investigate the murders of transgender women adds insult to injury and may be delaying justice

  • Map: How North Carolina's Early Voting Changes Affect Voters

    Residents of poor and rural counties have to drive farther than others to get to the polls during early balloting. Our map lets you explore the data

  • Map: The Immigrant Children's Shelters Near You

    ProPublica found 100 facilities holding immigrant children and have mapped 88 of them. Help us find out more about the facilities and the children being held there

  • Why America Fails at Gathering Hate Crime Statistics

    The FBI relies on local law enforcement agencies to identify and report crimes motivated by bias, but many agencies fumble this task

  • Map: This Is Where Hate Crimes Don't Get Reported

    FBI statistics on hate crimes remain frustratingly inadequate. Here are some of the jurisdictions where low or nonexistent reporting leave us with known unknowns.

  • Map: Preferential Rents in NYC

    Exclusive data that shows ZIP codes where rents could suddenly jump for rent-stabilized apartments

  • How One Major Internet Company Helps Serve Up Hate on the Web

    A story that eventually had a hand in Cloudflare deciding to kick the racist site The Daily Stormer off its network

  • Dangerous Passage and Multiplying Fines as Ice Is Left Uncleared

    A story about how the city fails to deal with ice left on sidewalks in the winter in NYC, and the danger that poses.

  • South Vermont Avenue: L.A. County's 'death alley'

    Did the first long-term analysis of homicide data in L.A. County to pinpoint and shed light on the 'deadliest' neighborhood.

  • Map: Across the Country, Reports of Swastika Graffiti

    A map telling the story of anti-Semitic graffiti collected as part of ProPublica's "Documenting Hate" project.

  • Quakebot

    Quakebot is a system that accepts USGS earthquake notification emails, analyses them for relevance, and creates an alert and LA Now blog post.

  • A 2-for-1 for Racists: Post Hateful Fliers, and Revel in the News Coverage

    A story about how white supremacists juke the media with hateful fliers

  • Los Angeles Teacher Ratings

    A project to rate the efficacy of teachers in LAUSD at raising test scores, using a statistical measure known as value-added.

  • With His Words and Deeds, Derek Jeter Never Entered Foul Territory

    Found all of the New York Times articles mentioning Derek Jeter, extracted all of the quotes we could attribute to him and used Natural Language Processing to analyze his words for a story with Dan Barry

  • Election DataBot

    A bot and database that constantly surfaces new, interesting campaign information -- and emails you when it sees something you'd like.

  • Map: Tracking Evictions and Rent Stabilization in NYC

    A map of more than 450,000 eviction cases in New York, along with rent stabilization information.

  • The Homicide Report

    The Homicide Report tracks every homicide victim in LA County, as reported by the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office.

  • How are elections run in your county?

    A tool that reports out stats for every election administration jurisdiction in the US, and automatically locates the user to personalize the story.

  • python-elections

    An open-source Python wrapper for the Associated Press' U.S. election data service. Used by quite a few fellow news organizations.

  • In search of the Eagle

    From San Francisco to Vienna, an informal family of gay bars has flourished