Washington Post hires Martinez from The Markup

Washington Post director of the data reporting team Meghan Hoyer, Deputy investigative editor Dave Fallis, Investigative editor in charge of The Washington Post’s dedicated investigative units Jeff Leen and Deputy editor focused on long-term investigations Sarah Childress sent out the following on Monday:

We’re excited to welcome Emmanuel Martinez to The Post, where he’ll be a data reporter embedded on the long-term investigative team.

Emmanuel comes to us from the Markup, the investigative nonprofit newsroom focusing on tech and algorithmic accountability. His work [themarkup.org] there surfaced new evidence of discriminatory lending practices that lenders had previously denied existed. The investigation, which recently won a National Headliner Award, sparked the Department of Justice, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to create a new program to combat modern-day redlining.

Inequality in homeownership is a story Emmanuel has pursued for the last five years. While at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, his 2018 project “Kept Out [revealnews.org]” identified more than 60 metro areas where people of color were more likely to be denied a mortgage than similarly qualified White applicants and highlighted the lenders that perpetuated those disparities.

That project, which analyzed roughly 31 million mortgage loans, was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting and won the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, the Peabody Award and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award.

Emmanuel has also developed a tool to help match unidentified bodies with missing persons’ reports, reported on why wildfires in the West are growing larger and sparking closer to homes, and dug into water shortages in California’s Central Valley, which produces a quarter of the nation’s food.

Emmanuel, who will be based in San Diego, has taught data journalism at the University of Southern California and the University of California at Berkeley and conducts newsroom diversity training with the Maynard Institute. He graduated from UC-Irvine with a bachelor’s degree in literary journalism and received a master’s degree in journalism from USC.