Tag: job

Job news: I’m joining McClatchy DC as a data developer

After nearly five years at The Washington Post, I’m thrilled to start a new job in late September focused on data stories, projects and tools at McClatchy’s DC bureau.

I’ve loved working in the Post newsroom with such fantastic, inspiring coworkers. From starting on health/science and then world/national security production to building news apps/tools and managing local data projects to now producing on Team Rainbow, it’s been an invaluable and rewarding experience.

At McClatchy, this new role offers an unique opportunity to collaborate with their formidable DC bureau and across their 29 news organizations, plus sit near former Post colleagues who are part of an impressive video team. It’s also a chance to work again with my hometown paper The Miami Herald, where I freelanced and interned during college. I can’t wait to join all the talented journalists at McClatchy.

Here’s the very kind announcement from my new boss, Julie Moos:

All,

I’m excited to announce that Greg Linch will be joining us late this month to help plan, produce and launch data-driven projects coming out of our local newsrooms and out of DC.

Greg’s arrival enables us to broaden and deepen our data efforts, which you’ll be hearing more about in coming weeks. To start, we plan to provide do-it-yourself tools and a range of support for the data storytelling that’s becoming so essential to readers everywhere across a range of subjects.

Greg joins us from The Washington Post, where he currently works on Project Rainbow (the tablet team); his previous roles there include local data editor, news apps producer and national security producer. He has FOIAed and negotiated with local agencies to publish their daily crime data or weekly crime reports; led work on voter’s guides and results pages for primary and general elections; developed systems for handling documents (like the Clinton emails) and email newsletters; and worked on many projects that required reporting skills as strong as his coding skills.

Greg is a member of the board of directors of the Online News Association, co-organizer of the DC Hacks/Hackers chapter and an all-around great journalist capable of elevating our work in interesting ways. Here’s his resume.

Greg will be based at Tish’s old desk, as he fills the position opened by her departure. His professional career started at The Miami Herald and we are happy to lure him back to McClatchy, starting Sept. 29.

Thanks for joining me in making him feel welcome.

Julie

New role at The Washington Post: I’m now an editor working on local projects!

It’s time for a job update! My six-month stint with our newsroom developer team (an internal apprenticeship, if you will) ended in December and a great opportunity quickly presented itself…

I’m very excited to announce that I’m now working with the local team on medium- and long-term journalism and technology projects. I’ll also be diving into big breaking stories when those arise.  

This new role blends project management and hands-on work (e.g. continuing to put those improved code skills to use!). I’ll be collaborating with editors, reporters and others across the newsroom, including the developer team. Karaoke is not an official responsibility, but we’ll see how that plays out.

Here’s the announcement:

We’re pleased to announce that Greg Linch is Local’s new innovations editor. He joins the staff after working for six months with newsroom developers building web tools for reporters, editors and producers. Greg was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper at the University of Miami with a focus on traditional writing and reporting until he began dabbling with coding during his junior year. By the time he graduated, he’d become an entrepreneur, co-founding a college media start-up, and gravitated to another start-up in Loudoun County called Publish2. He joined the Post in 2010 as a producer for Health & Science before moving on to Politics, briefly, and then the Foreign Desk.

We’re confident that Greg’s training in journalism and his burgeoning technical skills will enable him to help reporters and editors find new and expansive ways to tell stories, present data, hold public agencies accountable and find new audiences on the web and on mobile devices. He can speak multiple newsroom languages, he understands what’s possible across digital media, and he’s passionate about working closely with reporters and editors. He previously worked on the Zero Day series with Bob O’Harrow, who says Greg is “totally smart, really collegial and makes stuff happen.” In his copious spare time, Greg has also served as an adjunct instructor for Northwestern’s Medill National Security Journalism Initiative for the past two fall quarters. This year, he begins a two-year term on the Online News Association’s board of directors. Please join us in congratulating him on his important new assignment.

Send me your ideas, especially D.C.-area folks!

New role at The Washington Post: Special projects and news applications producer

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be starting a new role here at The Washington Post, news about which was just sent to the newsroom:

We are excited to announce that Greg Linch will be moving into a new hybrid technology / newsroom role starting June 1.  Since coming to the Post in December 2010, he has desk-pedaled his way across a few sections.

Greg began by producing for the health, science and environment team.  Those months rekindled a childhood interest by feeding and growing his natural curiosity about the world.  He then put both halves of his journalism-political science double major to use during a short stint with the politics team before starting an exciting year working with the foreign and national security desks.

All the while he’s been improving his technical knowledge with the ultimate goal of doing better journalism, such as creating a few handy tools and helping to make some production tasks more efficient.  That’s no surprise, of course, considering the two start-ups he previously worked on — one for college media when he was at the University of Miami and one that made tools for newsrooms before he joined the Post.

At the Post we have section producers who primarily work in a CMS and engineers who build news applications, but nothing in between.  Greg will pioneer an experimental role to straddle web production and web development — a special projects and applications producer position that will focus on more technical and medium to long-term projects and solutions.

We see Greg as a person who can look beyond standard journalism forms to help develop technology that pushes the boundaries of storytelling alongside the newsroom.  He will partner with editors and technologists to conceive and create tools that engage users with our journalism; current examples of apps in development include a polling interface and our new live blogging platform.  He will work with the entire newsroom, from producers to reporters to designers to find places where development can come together to create new technology that serves our users and our journalism.

Greg will spend the first 3 – 6 months of this new role training exclusively with engineers: honing his development skills.  After he completes this initial embedding in web development, he’ll be working in the newsroom through Cory Haik and be deployed on projects within news and alongside the embedded engineering group run by Washington Post Chief Architect Greg Franczyk.

Update: The world producer role has been filled.

 

New role at Washington Post: world/national security producer

Quick update from the The Washington Post newsroom: starting July 1, I will join the foreign desk as the world and national security producer. Anup Kaphle (who has been the world/national security web editor on the Universal News Desk) and I will be moving from the UND to work directly with the world and national security teams.

I’ve had a great experience working with the health, science, environment and wellness reporters and editors since I joined the Post in December and am very excited at this new opportunity be a full member of the foreign editing team — truly integrated with the section.

Stay tuned!

Joining The Washington Post as a web producer

I’m excited to announce that, beginning Dec. 6, I will be joining The Washington Post as a web producer on the Universal News Desk.

I’m thrilled at the opportunity to work with Cory Haik (I’ll be reporting directly to her), the UND team and other awesome journalists throughout the newsroom. My focus will be on breaking news and working with the national desk to produce their health and environmental coverage, with engagement tied at the heart of everything.

My perspective as a journalist has evolved immensely since I graduated from the University of Miami in May 2009 (read my reflections on those four years) and last worked in a newsroom (Dallas Morning News internship in the summer of 2009). I’ve rethought my thinking and how we can better inform our work with computational thinking and programming concepts, began exploring innovation and ideas through different lenses, and — overall — continued expanding my mind (get a taste with my commonplace book). I look forward to bringing all that to the Post, along with the additional coding and technical skills I’ve taught myself in the past 18 months — and continue to learn (Python and Django next!).

Overall, I can’t wait to get back into the newsroom, collaborate with other areas I have experience or interest in (such as the programming, design, video, engagement and other teams) and do awesome work. I’ll be sure to let you all know more about the job after I start and see how the role evolves.

Why the job change?

Publish2 is moving to Los Angeles and, after a serious decision-making process, I decided for personal reasons that I wanted to stay in the D.C. area. Thus, we have amicably parted ways. The move is good news for Publish2 (stay tuned for more details on that soon), but L.A. is not for me at this time.

I want to emphasize that this was a personal decision to stay. Publish2 has been a unique and invaluable experience for me since I began in September 2009. My first full-time job out of college (see Publish2’s announcement), I learned many things about technology and business first-hand while working at a small start-up. My co-workers have been great and I’ve enjoyed working on tools that help journalists and news organizations.

Northern Virginia has been my physical home for the past year and the D.C. journalism-technology community has become my family here. From friends and acquaintances to meetups and conferences, deep down I know this is right place for me at this point in my life.

With that in mind, I’m also moving from Ashburn, Va. to Arlington, Va. (orange line on the metro, w00t!). No longer will I need to drive to the metro to get into D.C. I’ll leave it to you to imagine how many more meetups it will be possible for me to attend…