Al Shaw

Senior News Application Developer

Photo of Al Shaw

Al Shaw is a Senior News Application Developer at ProPublica. He uses data and interactive graphics to cover environmental issues, natural disasters and politics.

A year before Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston, Shaw was part of a team that produced “Hell and High Water,” which warned of the region's vulnerability to coastal storms. The project won a Peabody Award in 2017. Shaw's project, “Losing Ground,” about the century-long erosion of Louisiana's coast won a Gold Medal from the Society for News Design. His interactive maps surrounding FEMA's response to Hurricane Sandy were honored with the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award. Before joining ProPublica, Shaw was a designer/developer at the political news website Talking Points Memo.

Timeline: How One Blast Affected Five Soldiers

TimelineSetter: A New Way to Display Timelines on the Web

As far as we know, there are no good open source frameworks that web developers can use to generate timelines quickly without losing design flexibility. So we made our own.

FOIA b(3) Exemptions

Information about watermelon handlers, avocado importers and caves are some of the categories of information that have been withheld from federal Freedom of Information Act requesters using sections of laws that are otherwise unrelated to disclosure. There are hundreds of such laws, according to data compiled by the Sunshine in Government Initiative. They fall under number three -- known as b(3) -- of the nine exemptions. Use our database to see how extensively agencies use b(3) exemptions.

Disability Discharge Timeline and Documents: Calls for Reform and One Borrower’s Struggle

Disability Discharge Timeline and Documents: Calls for Reform and One Borrower’s Struggle

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