Teo Popescu
Design, Graphics, and Data Editor
About
Teo is the KUOW newsroom's design, graphics, and data editor. She manages all data visualizations, graphics, illustrations, and news video stories for kuow.org and Instagram. She also leads design and development for KUOW’s interactive feature stories, specializing in visualizing complex bureaucratic processes and budgets. She co-hosts Control F with Clare McGrane.
Teo came to KUOW in 2018 as the first in-house design lead at the station. She created the newsroom's graphics standards and style. In a previous era, she was a state political correspondent for PubliCola and the print editor of Nightingale, the magazine of the Data Visualization Society. Her work has appeared on PubliCola, KUOW, ProPublica, NPR, and the HBO show Wyatt Cenac's Problem Areas. Outside of work, Teo likes spending time teaching graphic journalism courses at the University of Washington and UC Berkeley, or making mediocre furniture — the latter is still a work in progress.
Location: Seattle
Languages: English, Romanian
Pronouns: she/her
Professional Associations: Board Member, Society of Professional Journalists of Western Washington; Editor, Data Visualization Society
Podcasts
Stories
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Does immigration enforcement reduce crime?
Immigration enforcement, and specifically Immigrations and Custom Enforcement, have taken center stage in President Trump's second term. The president has tied immigration to crime, and claims immigration enforcement will reduce crime. But data shows that immigrants are less involved in crime than U.S. citizens, and there's little evidence that enforcement of immigration laws shifts crime rates.
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Are prediction markets illicit gambling? Washington state says yes
Washington is joining the queue of states bringing legal action against Kalshi, a popular prediction market. The platform allows users to wager money on everything from sports, to politics, to pop culture — and even military actions.
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Why am I seeing so many sports gambling ads? (a.k.a. The Kalshi Question)
Sports gambling has skyrocketed in the past five years. Now, prediction markets like Kalshi allow people to bet on anything, posing legal and moral questions that do not yet have answers.
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Who decided my dog is ‘too big’ for my home?
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Can we get better at measuring homelessness?
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U.S. health care spending is the highest on Earth. Here's why
Most health care services in the U.S. cost at least twice what they do in other countries, and sometimes up to ten times as much.
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Credit scores are mysterious. Here’s some insight into them
Credit scores are pretty mysterious, but they also shape your economic destiny. It determines where you can live, what you can buy, and sometimes even what job you can get. But how do credit bureaus come up with these all-encompassing numbers? This President's Day we turn to KUOW's newest podcast Control F where host Teo Popescu tells host Clare McGrane about the data that credit scores feed on, and how little we really know about how they're calculated.
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Why does health care cost so much in the United States?
Healthcare costs are higher in the United States than any other country, thanks to a complex system of healthcare providers, insurers and patients that keep prices high.
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We are really good at predicting the weather, actually
Winter storms this week have shattered records, taken lives, and forced people to hunker down at home from Texas to Maine. The ability to forecast weather this severe days in advance helps people prepare, and get to safety when they can. Today's detailed and precise forecast models are only possible because of data — data that meteorologists have gathered and analyzed for decades with increasingly vast reach and sophisticated technology.
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How did we get so good at predicting the weather?
Two journalists explain how weather forecasting works, and how it has developed over the last 65 years into a more precise prediction than ever before.