When the deadline is yesterday

An interactive scrollytelling piece built with custom JavaScript injected into a CMS that didn’t support it. I added a moving-camera effect to guide readers through a dense network of names and connections across several countries. Named Innovation of the Year in media by Wirtualne Media in 2026. Read the full story.

Two days before publication, the Lithuanian prosecutor’s office decided to go public ahead of our investigation. That’s how I went from having two days to finish an interactive visualization — to having twenty minutes.

The story was long and winding, full of unfamiliar surnames and places spread across several countries. I wanted to build something interactive so readers could actually navigate it — not just scroll past a wall of names.

I had a week, an illustrator who happened to be my sister’s school friend, and one very annoying technical constraint: our newsroom’s website doesn’t support custom JavaScript. So before writing a single line of code, I had to negotiate admin rights and carve out a corner of the CMS where I could quietly drop my scripts in.

Here’s how we were planning the layout with my colleague:

Youyou Zhou, a graphic reporter at WaPo, helped me with this project.

She suggested a subtle moving-camera effect — something a WaPo author had used to guide readers through a dense piece. Exactly what I needed.

Here’s a quick mock-up showing how the motion helps you track who’s who.

Everything was going according to plan — until the evening two days before publication, when the Lithuanian prosecutor’s office decided to release their findings ahead of our investigation. Instead of two days, I suddenly had twenty minutes. Somehow we made it work.

Here’s what the final piece looks like: read it here.

If I’d had more time, I would’ve worked on the background design and figured out how to stop the images from going pixelated. But honestly — if this story answers one question in a job interview, I hope it’s this one: can I work under pressure? Yes. Even when the deadline was yesterday.

In 2026, the sabotage story was named Innovation of the Year in media by Wirtualne Media.

“An example of innovative investigative journalism where form is as important as content. A complex, international investigation into Russian sabotage was told in an engaging, narrative, multimedia format that guides the reader through each stage of the story and makes the intricate mechanics of an intelligence operation easier to understand. It’s a combination of deep research, OSINT work, and modern storytelling that goes beyond a classic article — and shows how an innovative form can amplify the power of journalism. Presented as an immersive story that reads like fiction, yet rests entirely on hard investigative findings.”