Ben Welsh
News Applications Editor, Reuters
Ben Welsh is the news applications editor at Reuters, the world’s largest independent news agency. In that role, he leads the development of dynamic dashboards, interactive databases, and automated insights that benefit clients, inform readers, empower reporters and serve the public interest. He is also a fellow at DePaul University’s Center for Journalism Integrity & Excellence.
Projects he has contributed to have been awarded The Pulitzer Prize, the Library of Congress Innovation Award, a Knight News Challenge grant and numerous other prizes for investigative reporting, digital design and online journalism.
Prior to Reuters, he spent 15 years at The Los Angeles Times. There he co-founded The Times’ first digitally-focused projects team and went on to lead the modernization of the newspaper's graphics department. In those roles, he helped to create the most popular pages in the history of latimes.com, including the site's first live election results, a mapping platform that set a new standard for defining L.A. neighborhoods, custom designs for dozens of flagship projects, an award-winning wildfire tracker and the most complete resource on the spread of COVID-19 in California.
His data-driven reporting has led to reforms in the Los Angeles Fire Department’s 911 system, overhauls to how the city recruits and hires firefighters, a revamp of a broken building inspection program, the replacement of the Los Angeles Police Department's public crime map, as well as increased fines against exploitative landlords. As a result, two city fire chiefs and the Los Angeles fire marshal have left office.
He's a code contributor to many open-source software projects, including Project Jupyter, Django, IPython, pandas and Altair. He’s also led the development of dozens of tools that ease access to data published by government agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and an array of wildfire tracking systems.
Session: What is a Data Journalist?
Friday, March 15, 2024 | 9:45 a.m.–10:30 p.m.