Bloomberg’s Keller joins New York Times’ investigations team

Gabriel Dance, the deputy investigations editor at The New York Times, sent out the following announcement:

Michael Keller, a reporter at Bloomberg, is joining Investigations to report on artificial intelligence, algorithms, robots and technology.

At Bloomberg, Michael wrote about FEMA’s flood maps and built graphics tracking President Trump’s conflicts of interests across the globe. Prior work — demonstrating creative flair and technical prowess — includes interactive maps detailing how much space the millions of Syrian refugees would occupy in the United States, and an examination of the Apple “kill list,” or what words the iPhone refuses to offer spelling suggestions for.

In 2015, he was able to break the story on how fast Amtrak 188 was going just before it crashed outside Philadelphia, because he had set up a program to track train speeds. The project won the Online News Association award for breaking news. He also co-wrote a graphic novella about privacy and big data that was recently translated into French and German.

Michael grew up in Los Angeles and went to college at Georgetown, where he majored in comparative literature (mostly French) and cognitive psychology. He also earned a master’s degree from Columbia Journalism School. Besides Bloomberg, he has worked at Newsweek/The Daily Beast and Al Jazeera America. He was also a research fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia, where he created a project that sought to help newsrooms better measure the qualitative impact of their work.

Oh, and he was once an extra on an episode of “Full House.”

He starts on Monday. Please welcome him to The Times.