“Contracted Out” was a massive effort pulled together by four faculty members and dozens of students at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Derek Willis, lecturer in computational and data journalism, suggested the project and worked with students in his news applications class to process the data. Those students were: Sapna Bansil, Zijian Ding, Destiny Herbers, Amanda Hernández, Fatema Hosseini, Victoria Ifatusin, Jon Meltzer, Ryan Mercado, Devon Milley, Stephanie Quinn, Varun Shankar, Victoria Stavish, Shreya Vuttaluru, Hanna Zakharenko and Hannah Ziegler.
Jerry Zremski, director of the Local News Network at the University of Maryland, assembled several of the stories from his own reporting as well as research by the following students who studied multimedia reporting in the spring semester: Charles Bachmann, Benicio Balignot, Joseph Barke, Jack Bowman, Henry Brown, Eli Cohen, Brendan Cross, Aaron Dious, Skylar Drew, Samantha Ebner, Christine Folivi, Miles Grovic, Jackson Hawkins, Samantha Hooley, Zachary Intrater, Vienne Istvan, Abby Jablonski, Erica Javadpour, Tariq Jernigan, Matthew Landsman, Tyler Lochte, Jan Carlo Marin, James Matheson, Sarah Meklir, Sydney Nauman, Kayla Nazaire, Sofia Paternite, Andrew Rich, Fiona Roy, Evony Salmeron, Ariel Sheinberg, Elizabeth Shirley, Brennan Stewart, John Susanin, Max Thaler, Laura Van Pate, Marissa Yelenik and Christian Young.
Adam Marton, director of the Capital News Service Digital Bureau, oversaw the project’s design. Destiny Herbers, who graduated this spring with a master’s in journalism from Merrill College, designed the project’s data page. She also developed the web application that displays summaries of vendor payments in each of the state’s 24 school districts.
Editors: Marty Kaiser, managing director of Capital News Service, and Josh Land, communications manager at Merrill College.
Kara Thompson of the Capital News Service Annapolis Bureau and Joel Lev-Tov, an independent study student with the Local News Network, also contributed to the project.