As senior photojournalist at St. Louis Public Radio, I was part photographer and part photo editor. For the five year anniversary of the killing of Michael Brown Jr., the newsroom developed Living #Ferguson, an interactive piece that centered the voices of more than a dozen people who lived through the events in Ferguson in 2014.

I remember a couple of challenges: One was trying to make a wide variety of portraits of each person so I could have a lot of photos to choose from later on. The way the project was designed, each person’s photo would pop up multiple times as audio clips of them talking played and I wanted to make sure the site didn’t look too visually repetitive. Another challenge was selecting photos that would work well as full sized horizontals on mobile but also work well as verticals on desktops.

Additionally, I did a lot of strategizing around this project as it started to come to fruition within the newsroom. I’d spent years covering the aftermath of the uprising in Ferguson and had built a lot of trust with local activists and organizers as well as Mike Brown’s family. Having been at protests and vigils and community meetings and consent decree hearings, I had a unique perspective that I made sure to bring to discussions around how to cover this unfortunate anniversary in a sensitive way.