Jacob
Fenton

Software Developer, Media Consultant, Journalist

I'm a software developer, media consultant and journalist based in Portland, Oregon. I've spent years working on ingesting, analyzing, visualizing and verifying public records and GIS data; building and managing web sites and search tools for investigators on scaleable cloud infrastructure and coordinating complex projects between editorial and technical teams around the country.

Since 2016 I've worked primarily as a consultant / contractor on projects for clients, including The New York Times, ProPublica, National Public Radio, The Investigative Reporting Workshop, The Center for Public Integrity, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Kaiser Health News, The Center for Investigative Reporting and others. I've been increasingly concerned about the state of local media; I've also worked on smaller projects with local groups including Oregon Public Broadcasting, Underscore News, The Portland Tribune, The Lund Report and InvestigateWest.

In 2015/2016 I was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University, a prestigious fellowship that allows journalists to take university classes for a year. I had a particular focus on machine learning, atmospheric science and fracking. Prior to that I was Editorial Engineer at the Sunlight Foundation, in Washington D.C. where I specialized in campaign finance and congressional ethics data. Before that I worked as Director of Computer-Assisted Reporting at the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University; as Database Editor at the Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania); and as a beat reporter for newspapers in Pennsylvania and California. Ages ago I was an intern at Willamette Week and a reporter for the Portland State University Vanguard.

My undergraduate physics thesis was written in C++ and monitored real time engineering run data at LIGO Hanford. I also worked as a developer in academic publishing back when Perl was a viable language.

I'm reachable by email at jsfenfen at gmail. Send me an email if you need to talk on Signal or another secure channel. I'm also on Linkedin and Github.