NY Times adds five to its data team

The following excerpt was sent out from The New York Times’ Matt Ericson:

Today, I’m excited to share some new hires for these teams that will continue our investment in data-driven journalism.

In September, Lindsey Cook joined us on a temporary basis from Newsroom Development and Support, and her project management prowess became indispensable as Election Analytics barreled toward the November election. Now, Lindsey will move into a new role as strategy and operations deputy for Data, reporting to me, and will expand her work to include all groups in the data organization.

Lindsey began at The Times in 2017 as an editor on the Digital Transition team, now Newsroom Development and Support.  She spent a year covering the coronavirus pandemic, first as an embedded data editor on Metro and then as an editor on the coronavirus tracking project. Before joining The Times, she was the data editor for news at U.S. News & World Report.

The Business desk had let us borrow Will Davis — or more precisely, William P. Davis; note the middle initial for reasons that will become apparent later in this note — to run the Elections Analytics for the 2022 election cycle, and I’m thrilled that he decided to stay on in that role permanently.

Saurabh Datar joined Election Analytics just before the November elections as a software developer working on collecting the data needed to power an accurate election-night model. He joined us from WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, where he was an investigative data reporter and reported on topics including civil asset forfeiture and inequities in home loans lending while also building data visualizations.

Before that, Saurabh worked at The Boston Globe, where he worked with the Spotlight team and contributed data analysis and graphics to award-winning projects, including the 2021 Pulitzer Prize winner Blind Spot. Saurabh also worked at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as a reporter-developer and at newspapers and publications in Mumbai.

On Weather, Madison Dong joins the team as a graphics/multimedia editor to help create interactive charts, maps and other visualizations that track day-to-day weather and extreme weather events. Madison was recently a data visualization journalist at Axios, creating quick-turnaround graphics for newsletters. Prior to that, she worked as a graphics reporter at The Washington Post, where she designed and built visual stories, including a trackerfor Covid-19 variants and an election interactive that won a Society for News Design Award of Excellence.

And, a second William Davis — William B. Davis — will join the Weather team later this month as a graphics/multimedia editor. This William Davis comes to us from Mapbox, where he was a senior map designer. He’s previously designed visuals for Sun Life, Dow Jones Media and The Toronto Star.