Announcement from Executive Editor Marty Baron and Managing Editors Cameron Barr, Tracy Grant, Krissah Thompson and Kat Downs Mulder:
As our data director, Meghan will lead data projects and act as a consulting editor on data-driven stories, graphics and visualizations across the newsroom. Seven data journalists will report to her and remain embedded in their current departments — Graphics, Investigative, Metro and National. This new data journalism department will allow The Post to vet sourcing and analysis with added rigor and consistency and provide journalists in every department with a hub of expertise on data.
Meghan is a dynamic and accomplished editor who has helped lead the AP’s award-winning data journalism since 2015. Last year she was part of a team that received the AP Chairman’s Prize for their success in improving the distribution of datasets to member newsrooms and bureaus. The team’s work was part of two Pulitzer-finalist packages in 2019 — the AP’s coverage of family separation and a collaboration with Reveal on modern-day redlining. This year she has overseen the AP’s use of coronavirus data, which has yielded ground-breaking stories on racial disparities among those afflicted by covid-19.
At USA Today, where she was a data journalist from 2012-2015, Meghan was one of the lead reporters on Behind the Bloodshed, a much-heralded interactive data project that provided a comprehensive and revelatory assessment of 12 years of mass killings in the United States. She has also served as data editor at the Virginian-Pilot and as a reporter at the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette.
Meghan earned a bachelor of science in journalism at Northwestern University and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing at Old Dominion University.
A longtime member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Meghan is a founding donor of its Journalist of Color Investigative Reporting Fellowship and has served as a senior fellow for the data reporting fellowship at USC’s Center for Health Journalism. She lives in Alexandria with her husband and their son.
One of Meghan’s first duties will be to meet with the many reporters and editors around the room who are devotees of data so that she can develop the methodologies and workflows that can best serve our commitments to investigative journalism, visual storytelling and data-centric reporting. She will be a senior editor and report to Cameron.
Please join us in welcoming her when she starts on Jan. 11.
