WSJ hires DeBarros to work on data projects in DC bureau

The Wall Street Journal has hired data journalism expert Anthony DeBarros to work in its Washington bureau.

He will start in September.

DeBarros is the author of Practical SQL: A Beginner’s Guide to Storytelling with Data, published in May by No Starch Press. He wrote it to help beginning SQL coders learn how to draw meaningful insights from everyday data.

Most of his career has been in news media, focusing on data analysis. He spent more than 25 years at USA Today, Gannett Digital and the Poughkeepsie Journal, where our teams won multiple journalism awards.

He started in radio, covering local government for WEOK/WPDH radio in upstate New York. He’s also a longtime member of Investigative Reporters and Editors and a frequent speaker and trainer at its conferences.

He’s increasingly worked in product development. Through a grant from the Knight Foundation, he joined the IRE staff full-time in 2015-2016 to serve as director of product development for DocumentCloud. While there, he wrote pneumatic, a Python library for bulk-uploading documents, and fashioned a strategy for the platform’s long-term financial stability.

Currently, he leads content and product at Questex, a global B2B events and publishing company. He oversees digital editorial strategy and content syndication as well as the product roadmap for more than 70 media and events websites.