Los Angeles Times Hires Data Desk Editor

As part of the rebuilding of the Los Angeles Times, Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine and Deputy Managing Editor Sewell Chan made the following announcement.

We are delighted to announce that Casey Miller, a gifted computer programmer with a passion for the news, is joining our Data Desk next month.

Building off past projects like our Quakebot, Casey will work to automate and analyze data tracking the disasters — both natural and human-made — that threaten the homes, health and well-being of Californians. She will collaborate with our reporters to deepen readers’ understanding of earthquakes, wildfires and the effects of climate change across California and the West.

Since 2017, Casey has been a data visualization specialist in the Bay Area at Mapbox, a leading digital startup, where she has exploited the storytelling potential of technology and helped users to make their maps shine. One beneficiary of her work: Last month’s Los Angeles Times analysis, which found that 1 million California buildings are at severe risk from wildfires.

Before joining Mapbox, Casey was an engineer for Vox Media in New York. There, she helped develop innovative extensions to the company’s content-management system, and worked with reporters to create data-driven stories for sites like Curbed and Vox.

Casey received a degree in journalism of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2014. Upon graduation, she served as the Data Desk’s summer intern.

Casey is the first of several new hires we are making to the Data Desk. Under Ben Welsh’s leadership, this team has been a training ground for a generation of journalists who use software and statistics to tell stories. Journalism is becoming more collaborative, more visual and more technologically sophisticated, and the Data Desk’s teamwork and open-source ethos are a model for our newsroom.