My name’s Dennis Chase Reavis, but I go by Chase for a lot of different reasons. One of those is because in the city I’m from, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in most other places, all people think of when I say Dennis is- “like Dennis the Menace?” For awhile, that response helped me steer clear of certain people, but then I just got sick of saying my name was Dennis, so I changed it. Also, I’m technically from Sapulpa, Oklahoma, which is a pretty small town just west of Tulsa. There, people would hear “Dennis Reavis” and think of my dad, the star quarterback from the class of 1990. I didn’t really want to be held to that standard, either.

I was the editor of my high school newspaper and a photographer for my high school yearbook. Now, I’m a news reporter for the Traveler, a photographer for the Traveler, a photographer for the Hill Magazine, and I take photos for all sorts of things on the side.  I used to run RESKU International’s website, but stopped when I came to college. Also, I’ve been published in a few literary magazines and journals for poetry and other stuff that’s way too boring to write another sentence about.

Through being a photographer for the Arkansas Traveler, I’ve gotten to attend quite a few really cool events. Some of my favorite photos of some of my favorite events are pictured below.

Also, just for fun, here are some photos I’ve taken that aren’t for the Traveler:

So, from that, I’m pretty sure you can gather that my hobbies are writing, photography, and hating my first name. But besides that, I like long walks on the beach directly into the bottom of the ocean, watching my phone die and envying it, and watching Drop Dead Diva. No, but seriously, I really like reading, listening to music, spending time with friends, hiking, cooking, Game of Thrones theorizing, and pretty much anything that keeps me busy.

Since I started working for the Traveler, I’ve written a few stories, but my favorite has been my EMPOWER story. I think it’s my favorite just because it was my first real story for the Traveler that wasn’t a brief. And besides that, it was about something that I had no idea existed before I was assigned the task of writing about it. It was such a cool experience to write about it and, I don’t know, I’m just really proud of it.

My only data experience is from News Reporting I with you.

And then my only question/observation was just that I was hoping you could talk about how Data Journalism both complicates and simplifies journalism. Because to me it seems like it can both simplify data for readers or make it look extremely overcomplicated. Reading through the assigned chapters, I couldn’t make sense of one or two of the graphs without really trying to. Isn’t the point of graphing data that it makes the data easily understandable? How much work do we expect our readers to put into figuring out charts and tables?