Wall Street Journal U.S. editor Jennifer Forsyth sent out the following staff hire announcement on Friday:
We’re thrilled to announce the hiring of Jo Craven McGinty as a columnist to tell the tale behind numbers in the news. She will be a successor to Carl Bialik, who wrote the Numbers Guy column for eight years. (Obviously, the name will change.)
This column has been influential and well-read, bringing deep and entertaining analysis to news events and the use—and misuse—of statistics. Jo’s hiring is the first step in a plan to enlarge the scope and reach of the column; more on that soon.
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Jo is one of the country’s foremost data reporters. She comes to us from the New York Times, where her subjects included disparities in hospital billings, deadly railroad crossings and favoritism among banks in the Fed’s lending program. She also wrote a fun first-person piece for the Dining section on how she set up a database of recipes that pops out a list of groceries she needs for a given week, complete with what grocery-store aisle the ingredients are on.
Jo worked as an enterprise reporter at Newsday, as a professor of computer-assisted reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and as adviser to Investigative Reporters and Editors. Before that, she was a database specialist at the Washington Post, where her research led to the 1999 Pulitzer for Public Service and the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for a series on the use of deadly force by DC police.
Earlier in her career, she held a number of reporting and editing jobs in her native North Carolina.
