Ken Schwencke is a senior editor who leads ProPublica’s Data and News Applications teams, combining journalism, engineering, and product ownership to build interactive investigations and the widely used Nonprofit Explorer database. With 14 years of experience at outlets including The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, he has a track record of shipping data-driven tools—like Quakebot and Electionland systems—that accelerate reporting and public impact. He manages cross-disciplinary teams of reporters and programmers, experiments with ML/LLM tooling, and has tripled traffic and subscription engagement for major journalistic products. A former adjunct instructor, he also translates complex public records into searchable, auditable datasets and maintains practical open-source guidance on web scraping and data collection.
14 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
BS Journalism, BS Journalism at University of Florida
A step-by-step guide to writing a web scraper with Python
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:8 commits, 3 PRs, 10 pushes in 1 day
Contributions summary:Ken's commits primarily involve updating and maintaining documentation for a web scraping tutorial. They addressed issues related to a website's changes, specifically updating the URL and adding a user-agent to the requests. Furthermore, they rebuilt the documentation to reflect these changes, ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the tutorial.
Contributions:30 commits, 2 pushes in 2 years 1 month
as-a-servicenodejsdockermongodb
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Ken Schwencke - Senior Editor, Data And News Applications