ProPublica names Blustain, Buford assistant ME

The following excerpt was sent out from propublica.org:

ProPublica announced today that Sarah Blustain and Talia Buford will be joining the masthead as assistant managing editors, effective immediately. Both Blustain and Buford have already played critical leadership roles in some of ProPublica’s most ambitious initiatives.

Sarah Blustain has directed our Local Reporting Network with distinction since early 2021. She has led the selection of partners, overseen the project plans, organized training sessions, worked to increase diversity within the LRN, and created an office hours program to help newsrooms develop promising projects.

She joined ProPublica from Type Investigations, where for seven years she spearheaded longform investigative projects as deputy editor and executive editor.

Before that, she served as senior editor for Newsweek/The Daily Beast and The New Republic, and as deputy editor of The American Prospect. She received a B.A. from Wesleyan University.

As ProPublica’s first-ever talent development director, Talia Buford has played key roles in the transformation of our recruitment and retention efforts. She spearheaded the effort to find and implement a new data-management system that will allow us to better evaluate our hiring practices at a lower cost, and she runs our Emerging Reporters Program for college students seeking to pursue careers in reporting. Most recently, she played a key role in designing and launching ProPublica’s Investigative Editor Training Program.

Before taking on her talent development role, Buford was a reporter, covering the lax enforcement of environmental policies from Flint, Michigan, to Alaska to Salem County, New Jersey. In the early days of the pandemic, she co-wrote stories that were among the first to call attention to the staggering toll that COVID-19 was taking on African Americansand that were part of a ProPublica package that was named as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Buford came to ProPublica from The Center for Public Integrity, where her work focused on wage theft and the Environmental Protection Agency’s lackluster enforcement of federal civil rights provisions. She also covered energy for POLITICO Pro, and she started her career covering municipal and legal affairs at The Providence Journal in Rhode Island. She earned a master’s degree in law from Georgetown University Law Center and a bachelor’s degree in print journalism from Hampton University.