NY Times’ Ivory leads project tracking COVID-19

Danielle Ivory, an investigative reporter for the New York Times, is leading a project at the Times that tracks coronavirus clusters at colleges, nursing homes, and some other hot spots.

The tracking initiated in March after the newspaper created a database project with the goal of recording every case.

“We went county by county. Everything was collected manually, either online or by phone,” Ivory says.

The team began tracking cases at nursing homes, and Ivory often turned to phone calls to collect data. Later, the project also began tracking cases at colleges and universities, where data had to be collected manually.

For the project, Ivory is leading a team of more than 20 journalists, mostly hired for this project, to gather data.

Ivory is an award-winning journalist and is currently also part of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University – Graduate School of Journalism.

She has also worked as a reporter at Bloomberg for 3 years and was a reporter/producer at the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. She also held the same post at American News Project.

Ivory has also worked as a senior fellow at Bill Moyers Journal and was a research assistant at Oxford University Press. She was also a weekend edition Sunday intern at National Public Radio.

Additionally, Ivory is also the recipient of several awards, including:

• 2018 John B. Oakes Award for distinguished environmental reporting
• 2016 Sidney Award for her reporting on Wall Street’s push into 911 services
• 2014 Scripps Howard award for public service reporting
• 2014 Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for investigative reporting
• 2015 Deadline Club award for business investigative reporting

She was also a finalist for a 2015 Gerald Loeb Award and Livingston Award. Ivory was also a finalist for the 2013 Online News Association’s Gannett Foundation Award for Innovative Investigative Journalism, the 2012 Scripps Howard Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment, and the 2010 online journalism award from Investigative Reporters and Editors.