We are excited to announce that Jeremy Merrill will join The Post’s Data team as a data journalist embedded on the Technology team.
Jeremy comes to The Post after a year of freelance reporting, publishing much of his work in The Markup, where he has written about how Facebook charged Biden more for campaign ads in swing states than it did Trump, how Google blocks nonbinary people from seeing job ads and how tech firms profited from ads from far-right militia interests.
Over the past year, he has also transferred much of his work in tracking Facebook advertising to the NYU Cybersecurity for Democracy project, which builds collections of online political advertising data for research and journalism. He is also finishing his time as a fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, where he spent four months working on developing an AI-based prototype tool to assist reporters covering the federal courts.
Before freelancing, Jeremy worked as an investigative machine-learning journalist at Quartz and as a news applications developer at ProPublica and The New York Times. He wrote a major investigative series about precious metal scams aimed at conservative users of Facebook, scoured campaign finance data and used machine learning to track what Congress was talking about, examined how Wikipedia users kept changing Donald Trump’s entry, and trained other journalists in machine learning techniques. He was the subject of news stories when he started tracking airline flights over his apartment, and is one of the three core developers of Tabula, a popular open-source tool to help extract tabular data from PDF files.
A graduate of Claremont McKenna College, Jeremy holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and linguistics. Jeremy will work remotely from Atlanta, collaborating with colleagues in San Francisco, Washington and elsewhere.
Jeremy’s first day will be July 26. Please join us in welcoming him to The Post.