Ying Zhao joins San Francisco Chronicle as a newsroom engineer
We’re excited to announce that Ying Zhao has joined the San Francisco Chronicle as a newsroom engineer on the development team working on projects for Hearst newspapers.
Zhao joins our newsroom after working for KQED as a data researcher and participating in the New York Times COVID-19 data project. She worked as a feature editor for Hearst Magazines in Shanghai before coming to the United States and learning to program.
At The Chronicle, Zhao will lead the development of major projects, including a collection of live election results pages.
“With another big election year in 2022, Ying brings the journalistic drive and technical skills we need to create real-time interactions for readers across the country,” said Evan Wagstaff, senior developer on Hearst’s Central Interactives team. aka “the DevHub.” “She will be a key player in our development infrastructure, creating data feeds to advance our projects and discover new stories.”
After moving to the United States, Zhao attended UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and graduated from Columbia University’s Lede program in data journalism. In 2019, during her freshman semester at UC Berkeley’s J-School, she attended the editorial office of The Chronicle and met with the team she would join years later.
“I’ve always admired the way The Chronicle tells data stories and provides interactive tools for its readers,” she said. “I am very happy to be part of this newsroom.”
Zhao will be a key member of the DevHub team that develops projects and products for SFChronicle.com as well as Hearst newsrooms such as the Houston Chronicle, San Antonio Express News, (Albany) Times Union and the Hearst Connecticut Group. She’ll also be working with The Chronicle’s data team on local stories that’ll crack the numbers.
“I love digging through huge datasets for ideas, discovering data in a 300-page government report, and sharing whatever I find with the audience,” she said.
The power of local journalism to help people close to where they live led Zhao to work at The Chronicle.
“Improving local journalism inspires me to connect more deeply with the local communities,” she said. “Local journalism is the bedrock of democracy – without strong, solid local coverage, people cannot get the information they need to make informed decisions about the issues that affect them and their communities every day. Improving local journalism means improving the way society works. “
Via the San Francisco Chronicle
The San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfchronicle.com) is the largest newspaper in Northern California and the second largest on the West Coast. The San Francisco Chronicle was acquired by Hearst Corporation in 2000 and founded by Charles and Michael de Young in 1865, and has received six Pulitzer Awards for Journalistic Excellence. The staff won the ONA Online Journalism Awards for General Excellence in 2020 and for Breaking News coverage in 2019 and 2020. Follow us on Twitter at @SFChronicle.
