A Journalist Who Looks for Clues in Plain Sight
On The Times’s Visual Investigations team, Christiaan Triebert combines social media sleuthing and traditional reporting to piece together complex stories.
For Christiaan Triebert, an investigative video journalist at The New York Times, a detail as unassuming as the length of a person’s shadow can be key to uncovering the site of an extrajudicial killing.
“Most of the information I’m using is accessible to anyone with an internet connection,” said Mr. Triebert, a member of The Times’s Visual Investigations team. “It’s just a matter of putting the pieces together.”
Mr. Triebert specializes in open-source reporting: verifying and analyzing publicly available digital information, such as social media videos, satellite imagery or flight tracking information, to nail down a complex story. He has worked on more than 60 projects at The Times since he joined the newsroom in 2019, including two Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations.
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