Product design and front-end development are also essential skills for the pursuit of sustainable digital journalism, on the top of editorial experiences.

I began learning those during a three-month stint at Malaysiakini, Southeast Asia’s leading online news media covering politics and social issues. I was a part of its product team to work on designing its public relations site and wireframing the Kini Community project, which was funded by Google News Initiative’s APAC Innovation Challenge.

Here are examples of my works for better user experience of news.

TDPage: Weekly DePauw Briefing

Newsletter service I launched and am editing to expand the digital readership of The DePauw, Indiana’s longest-running college newspaper.

With MailChimp, I went through trial-and-error to achieve the best practice in email marketing, learned from successful newsletters at various professional media organizations.

Data journalism

Using tools for data scraping/cleaning/visualization (Import.io, Visualping, Tabula, OpenRefine, Google Sheet, Flourish, Infogram, etc.), I wrote stories such as:

• Map to track the novel coronavirus cases in Indiana and Illinois (The DePauw)
• Visualized admission and enrollment trends (The DePauw)
• Malaysia’s halal export decline explained (Malaysiakini), etc.

KantaroKomiya.com

This website, my online portfolio, is made with a WordPress theme ‘RichOne.’ I have tweaked the site with my HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript knowledge as well as design skills that aim at better user experience.

Sandboxing on my own website, I have improved the design of TheDePauw.com, an online edition of the college newspaper where I am in charge of product management. In my sophomore year, I was also in charge of website analysis using tools like Google Analytics.