I am an assistant managing editor at The New York Times, where I oversee a number of The Times’s data journalism efforts, including The Upshot, and the election analytics and weather data teams. I also serve as a newsroom lead working with the cross-functional product development teams that build our publishing systems, website and apps.

I joined The Times in 2003 as the graphics editor for the National desk, covering no shortage of natural disasters, political campaigns and breaking news stories. From 2006 to 2015, I was the deputy graphics director while The Times built its reputation for digital storytelling innovation and visual journalism, helping transform the graphics department from a print outlet to a multiplatform operation. In 2015, I became an associate editor on the masthead, leading product development of Scoop, The Times’s content management system, and became an assistant managing editor in 2018.

Before coming to The Times, I worked as a graphic artist and website editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, had internships at The Baltimore Sun and The Chronicle of Higher Education, and studied journalism at the University of Iowa.

I've spoken about data visualization, digital storytelling and publishing systems at a number of conferences including NICAR, SND, AIGA Pivot, Malofiej, the American Statistical Association's Joint Statistical Meeting and IEEE InfoVis, as well as to groups at schools like the University of Iowa, the University of Maryland's Human-Computer Interaction Lab, the University of Southern California and the Institute for Advanced Study.

I don’t write much code these days, but you can find me on Github at @mericson, where some of my past coding side hustles have included a name-parsing Ruby gem, some mildly useful scripts for Adobe Illustrator, and a script to convert recipes from FDX files to Mela’s format, among a few other things.

I used to post to a very infrequently updated blog, which includes one post about when maps shouldn’t be maps that has made its way into various data visualization syllabi, and another about the earliest election result maps in The Times.

And if you go way back into my earliest internet endeavours, I once designed a Linux logo for a contest where it improbably beat out Larry Ewing’s wonderful penguin in the voting. But Larry’s penguin was deservedly adopted as the Linux mascot.

You can reach me at [firstname]@[lastname].net