Krolik joins NY Times business news desk

New York Times business editor Ellen Pollock sent out the following on Monday:

Few people come home from their day jobs, pore over terabytes of leaked data in a language they don’t speak and help win a Pulitzer Prize for it.

That’s Aaron Krolik.

Over the last six years, as he has developed tools and formats for the Interactive News Technology department, Aaron has on the side worked on many high-touch, award-winning stories with Business and other desks, doing data reporting, scraping websites and reverse engineering apps. He has helped to reveal how your phones share what is supposed to be anonymous data, how old photos on Flickr have powered facial recognition technology and how military databases of fingerprint and iris scans have been sold on eBay. He even slandered himself on A1.

We’re excited that Aaron now gets to do this work full time. Aaron joined the Business desk in mid-July as a data and technical correspondent.

He’ll work on a range of topics, from technology to trade, with a particular emphasis on collecting and analyzing large information sets. Aaron will work closely with the newsroom’s Data team, the International desk and others across the newsroom. Aaron is in equal parts an engineer, digger and problem solver. His writing isn’t shabby either.

Since joining the Business desk, he’s already begun to make his mark: He recently led a story that uncovered how Russia has obtained nearly $4 billion in key restricted technology since the war began in Ukraine, and that many chips were shipped through a cluster of shell companies in Hong Kong.

Most recently as a senior engineer in INT, Aaron developed quiz and other tools that are widely used around the newsroom. He worked on Wordlebot, contributed to election coverage and helped to prototype the newsroom’s first live chat interface nearly a decade ago.

“Always keenly curious to understand how things work — be it a technology, the institution, the topic of a story — he trailblazed by intersecting ideas and disciplines, and was always happy to pitch in with his knowledge and time,” Ben Koski and Rachel Shorey recently wrote about Aaron to the INT staff.

Aaron joined The Times as a summer intern in 2015 after graduating from Duke University with a degree in electrical engineering.

Since then, he has worked with nearly every desk in the building: the Magazine, Metro, International, Travel, Culture, Styles, Obits, National. You get the point. He excels with collaboration.

He has shared Mirror, SOPA, Polk, SABEW and Loeb awards with many of our colleagues.

He has also performed the viola with the official New York Times classical quintet. They called themselves the Qwerty Ensemble.

Please join us in welcoming him.