Reuters names new data editor

Michael Williams, the global enterprise editor at Reuters, sent out the following announcement:

I’m writing to share the news of big changes to the data and enterprise teams.

Mo Tamman, the data team’s founding editor, wants to return to his first love, reporting. So, Mo will be taking up a new role, working on investigative-data projects with an international emphasis, reporting to me.

Janet Roberts, the deputy on the data team, will succeed Mo as Data Editor. She will report to me.

Janet is perfect for the job. Last year, she and colleagues Joan Biskupic and John Shiffman were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for their cutting-edge series “The Echo Chamber,” which the Pulitzer board lauded “for using data analysis to reveal how an elite cadre of lawyers enjoy extraordinary access to the U.S. Supreme Court, raising doubts about the ideal of equal justice.” Janet also did data work for Reuters’ Loeb Award-winning 2013 series on Chesapeake Energy, notably a story on land price-fixing that sparked state and federal criminal prosecutions. Janet joined Reuters in 2011, after seven years on the New York Times’ data journalism team. Before that, she did a variety of reporting and editing stints in North Carolina and Minnesota. She earned her B.A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and recently taxed her parental tolerance by taking her 17-year-old daughter on a tour of Duke. “At least,” she says, “the kid roots for the Red Sox and not the Yankees.”

Mo is one of the most innovative data journalists in the profession. He joined Reuters in 2011 from the Wall Street Journal, where he led one of the most ambitious projects in years — an analysis of the vast U.S. Medicare billings database, which exposed fraud around the country and sparked a federal court ruling that opened the data wider for journalists everywhere. Mo and his colleagues were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative journalism. At Reuters, in addition to editing data work that garnered Reuters its first honors from Investigative Reporters and Editors and other top awards, Mo developed our ground-breaking Reuters Polling operation, a venture with Ipsos. The online opinion poll, the most thorough of its kind, was among the most accurate during the last U.S. presidential election. Before moving to New York, he worked in Florida and New Jersey. Most comfortable in flip-flops, Mo has lived through seven winters on his sailboat, Calliope.