Chris Zubak-Skees

Data journalist

Center for Public Integrity

You donated to kids with cancer. This Vegas telemarketer cashed in.

Analyzed a universe of PACs that raise money in the name of children with cancer, police officers, firefighters and military veterans. Zeroed in one telemarketer's operation with a reporter, computed key numbers using scraped data. Subjects were later indicted, pled guilty to federal charges.

Center for Public Integrity

Wilbur Ross will shepherd Trump’s trade policy. Should he also own a shipping firm?

Analyzed millions of locations collected by satellites to track the shipping firm owned by a cabinet secretary whose ships sailed up the Yangtze River and to transfer points by the Black Sea. With the help of maps I built, driven by geospatial data, I found records from a Hong Kong maritime investigation which showed a ship docked in Iran at the height of sanctions.

Center for Public Integrity & FiveThirtyEight

How ActBlue is trying to turn small donations into a blue wave

Analyzed 80 million records in an analysis of Congressional Democratic candidates' reliance on this fundraising platform as it became the de facto way Democrats raise money. Found some donors gave again and again.

Center for Public Integrity

The invisible hazard afflicting thousands of schools

Used geospatial and geocoding to examine records of every U.S. public school and major road, identifying health risks to students with reporter Jamie Smith Hopkins.

The Washington Post

2022 election results

My scrapers helped the Post deliver election night predictions, my visualizations helped explain them, data pipelines I worked on helped process FEC data faster and my data analysis informed our coverage.

Center for Public Integrity

Public financial disclosure parser

Built a tool that helped newsrooms compile databases of Trump officials' financial histories. This was used to report a daily story by the New York Times, to build ProPublica's Trump Town news app and to report an award-winning national radio story with Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Center for Public Integrity

Find your state legislators' financial interests

Helped a reporting team collect, track and input data from nearly every state legislator's financial disclosure in the country, then built an app using DocumentCloud to search and view the disclosures.