The JJW Blog

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There are skills the Times geeks admire that could enlarge the capacities of journalists: a respect for databases, a sweeping fascination with the quantitative. (Pilhofer’s background is in quantitative history, which itself reshaped the romantic landscape of academia.) Also, a willingness to risk exposure, as well as a curiosity about visual tools that do not always come naturally to people who identify as writers. In this new world, reporters reveal their personalities as part of their job, a loss as well as a gain—many writers went into this business precisely not to be personalities, to subsume their work into that of a greater institutional voice.