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Image credit: Courtesy of Eduardo Sanchez.
Found-footage horror films exploded in popularity after the release of Maryland-made “The Blair Witch Project,” according to a Banner analysis of over 4,000 horror movies.

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What is a Maryland horror movie? There are 60 of them set in the state according to an extensive database compiled by a Reddit user. Those range from the wildly popular "The Blair Witch Project" to some very small productions. I used OpenAI's large language model GPT 4.1 to classify key characteristics of these 4,000+ horror films, identifying subgenre, setting and characteristics of the protagonist. This allowed me to identify a spike in the horror subgenres of found footage, backwoods, and isolation.

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A pair of huge Navy ships, the USNS Charlton, left, and the USNS Pomeroy, are docked near residential homes at North Locust Point on June 5. (Jerry Jackson/The Banner)
The plight of Locust Point residents who must live with constant noise from two military cargo ships got us wondering: How does the racket there compare to other noisy spots?

At the top of the summer, the federal government parked two military ships outside of Locust Point homes. Those ships ran off of a generator which emitted a din of 70 dB, constantly. My reporting partner wrote a series of stories about the impact of the noise pollution on residents prior to us collaborating to quantify just how bad it was. We visited the noisiest areas around Baltimore, measured the sound level, then compared them to the experience of Locust Point residents. We discovered that Locust Point residents were experiencing the loudest continuous noise of residential zones in the city.

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Image credit: Jerry Jackson/The Baltimore Banner.
The number of Howard County’s Indian residents has more than doubled since 2009, now accounting for 6.7% of the county’s total population.

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Koreans were once Howard County’s predominant Asian group, making up an estimated 3.6% of its residents in 2009. But over the past 15 years, the census tracts that former Gov. Larry Hogan and others long identified with Korean residents and businesses have seen that population dwindle while the Indian population surged.

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(Ariel Zambelich/The Banner; Original photos by Jerry Jackson/The Banner)
In 2024, more than 1 in every 3 county residents was born outside the U.S. That ranks 15th out of 841 counties included in census data.

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On breaking deadline, a reporter and I mined 2024 ACS 1-year data for story ideas on Montgomery County, MD. We explored census tables relating to affordability, higher education, race, and federal workers before eventually focusing on the foreign born population. We found that Montgomery County has one of the largest shares of immigrants in the country, even topping Manhattan, NY.

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(Yifan Luo for The Banner; Original photos by Getty Images)
When it comes to literacy rate improvements, many Baltimore City Public Schools take the top prize.

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(Ariel Zambelich/The Banner; Original photos by Getty Images)
Though making strides in English, Somerset County was one of the worst at improving math.

On breaking deadline, the data team worked together to clean embargoed Maryland state test score data then provide the education team with data findings. I acted as a backstop for the team's initial cleaning and pulled data findings for Baltimore City and Somerset counties.

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Patrick McCaslin/Miami New Times
Miami voters were split along lines of income, race, and country of origin.

This map was my first foray into data journalism. I cleaned the data by hand in Excel and created the maps in Flourish. I was able to add details by importing maps of Miami-Dade County roads, cutting out the ocean using QGIS, and adding points that corresponded to different neighborhoods and landmarks in Miami.