Kathleen Kingsbury, Patrick Healy and Charlotte Greensit | The New York Times
We are excited to announce two new hires in the opinion section.
Building on our terrific team effort and success with the recent Postcards project, we decided to create the position of climate editor in the opinion section, and undertook an extensive search to find a creative, thought-provoking journalist who has a blend of expertise on this crucial subject and an instinct for fresh and surprising storytelling on a topic that many readers feel they already understand. We’ve found a great editor for this important new role: Eliza Barclay is joining us from Vox and will work closely with Vanessa, Patrick, Chris, the vertical editors and our graphics and visual teams to shape the section’s climate coverage and collaborations.
We’ve asked Eliza to focus especially on how to bring climate opinion journalism to as wide an audience as possible, rather than appealing chiefly to insiders and activists. We found a passionate reader/viewer/listener response to the Postcards project in part because it fused ideas, visuals, audio, graphics, analysis and on-the-ground storytelling. We want to learn from that success, and from some of our best climate guest essays, to lean into feature writing, pieces from locales both near and far-flung, photo-driven guest essays, data visualization, interactives and quizzes and other story forms to engage and surprise more people with climate coverage. We are also hungry for the unexpected and surprising pieces; in our interviews with Eliza, she spoke insightfully about the challenge of engaging readers with climate pieces when they are exhausted or disheartened about the state of the world, or think they know enough already, or don’t want pieces that feel like homework or written for insiders. We want her to work with our visual, graphics and opinion editors to elevator this coverage in exciting ways.
At Vox, Eliza was the science, health and climate editor, and led a team of reporters who covered everything from the pandemic and climate policy to space and the replication crisis in psychology. Beyond editing news and features, she launched several special projects that experimented with new formats and coverage areas. Most recently, her team explored the collateral health effects of the pandemic and the biodiversity crisis.
In 2019 she received a Pulitzer Center grant to lead and help write an innovative visual project on three “supertrees” — remarkable species with climate “superpowers” under threat of deforestation. The project won an Online Journalism Award, a Scripps Howard Award and a Pictures of the Year International award.
Before joining Vox, Eliza was a web editor and reporter with the science desk at NPR, where she co-edited the James Beard Award-winning food blog “The Salt.” She also did occasional feature stories on air for “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”
Early in her career, Eliza reported from Mexico as a stringer for the Houston Chronicle and freelanced for many other outlets. She holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins.
Andrew Trunsky is our new editorial assistant supporting Maureen Dowd. He was most recently a fellow at the Daily Caller News Foundation, where he reported on Congress, elections and American politics. He recently covered policies like the enhanced child tax credit, writing how its lapse affected working families across the country. Andrew graduated in 2020 from Williams College, where he majored in political science with a focus on international politics and was an All-American swimmer. He originally hails from the Detroit suburbs and is an avid University of Michigan fan.
Please join us in welcoming Eliza and Andrew.
