Editorial

Bill Keller, Editor-in-chief

Tim Golden, Managing Editor for Investigations and News

Gabriel Dance, Managing Editor for Digital

Ken Armstrong, Staff Writer

Maurice Chammah, Staff Writer

Andrew Cohen, Commentary and Analysis Editor

Dana Goldstein, Staff Writer

Tom Meagher, Data Editor

Raha Naddaf, News Editor

Gerald Rich, Interactive Reporter

Alysia Santo, Staff Writer

Beth Schwartzapfel, Staff Writer

Christie Thompson, Staff Writer

Claudine Tomlinson, Administrative Assistant

Ivar Vong, Director of Technology

Simone Weichselbaum, Staff Writer

Management

Neil Barsky, Founder and Chairman

Eli Stern, Chief Financial Officer

Crystal Hayes, Office Manager

READ WHAT THE PRESS ARE SAYING.

New York – An Interview with Bill Keller
“We have a journalistic target set that’s pretty vast,” Keller tells Joe Coscarelli.

Capital New York – The Marshall Project’s Charmed Launch
How do you get a $5 million-a-year journalism outfit funded by philanthropists up and running?

Financial Times – The Birth of a New Media Species
Why The Marshall Project represents the future of news.

New York Times – College for Criminals
As New York governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposal for prison college courses fails, Bill Keller asks: “What is prison for?”

New York Times – Crime and Punishment and Obama
Bill Keller’s farewell column.

NPR – New York Times Veteran Bill Keller Joins Marshall Project
An interview with our editor.

Nieman Journalism Lab – Making Single-Focus Nonprofit News Sites Work
Bill Keller and Neil Barsky want to create a site that produces both short- and long-
term investigations distributed on the web and through partnerships.

Newsweek – How a Journalism Project No One Had Heard of Stole Times Columnist Bill Keller
An interview with our founder, Neil Barsky.

Columbia Journalism Review – Bill Keller Moves to The Marshall Project
“If you’re going to do all of this, you have to be ambitious about it,” Keller said.

New York Times – Bill Keller, Former Editor of The Times, Is Leaving for News Nonprofit
The Marshall Project is “is intended to be a bit of a wake-up call to a public that has gotten a little numbed to the scandal that our criminal justice system is.”

Ivar Vong is a journalist and developer interested in the intersection of visual storytelling, data and code.

Vong joined Emerald Media Group in 2012 as the company transitioned to digital-first newsroom. He built mobile and web apps for the news and business teams, including a student housing search app and an Oregon football iPhone app.

Vong studied applied mathematics at the University of Oregon. As a photojournalist, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Oregonian and the Register-Guard, among others. He loves tinkering with electronics and flying RC copters.

Bill Keller is The Marshall Project’s first editor-in-chief.

Keller worked for The New York Times from 1984 to 2014 as a correspondent, editor and, most recently, as an Op-Ed columnist. From July 2003 until September 2011, he was the executive editor of The Times. During his eight years in that role, The Times sustained and built its newsgathering staff, winning 18 Pulitzer Prizes, and expanded its audience by adapting the newsroom to the journalistic potential of the Internet. The newsroom also participated in the creation of a digital subscription plan to help secure the company’s economic future.

Before becoming executive editor, Keller had spent two years as an Op-Ed columnist and senior writer for The New York Times Magazine. He served as managing editor from 1997 to 2001, and as foreign editor from 1995 to 1997.

As chief of The Times bureau in Johannesburg from April 1992 until May 1995, he covered the end of white rule in South Africa. From December 1986 to October 1991, Keller was a Times correspondent in Moscow, reporting on the easing and ultimate collapse of Communist rule and the breakup of the Soviet Union. In 1989, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage.

Before coming to The Times, Keller was a reporter for The Dallas Times Herald, the Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report in Washington and The Portland Oregonian.

Keller graduated from Pomona College with a B.A. degree in 1970 and is a member of the college’s board of trustees. He lives in New York with his wife, Emma Gilbey Keller, and their daughters, Molly and Alice.

Nicole Gordon is an attorney and public policy expert. She was the founding executive director of New York City’s pioneer Campaign Finance Board, which administers public financing for political campaigns and is considered a national and international model. As vice president of the JEHT Foundation, Gordon oversaw funding of a wide range of criminal justice projects, including evaluating promising reforms in prisoner re-entry policy across the country. She recently chaired the Accountability Task Force of the New York State Office of Public Safety, and has assisted the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the New York City Department of Investigation on special projects.

Gordon received the Outstanding Service Award from the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws, the Columbia Law School Lawrence A. Wien Prize for Social Responsibility and a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellowship at Harvard Law School. She produced “An Empire of Reason,” an Emmy-award winning documentary about the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

She is a graduate of Barnard College and Columbia Law School. She was a law clerk to the Hon. Harold Medina of the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals and an associate at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton, where she worked on First Amendment cases. She was subsequently counsel to the chairman of the New York State Commission on Government Integrity (“The Feerick Commission”). Gordon teaches a course in Law and Public Policy at the NYU/Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

You can reach us at info@themarshallproject.org
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Mailing Address and Phone:
250 W. 57th Street, Suite 2514
New York, NY 10107
212 803 5200

Maurice Chammah is a staff writer based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, The Texas Observer, The Revealer, and Guernica.

As a 2011-2012 Fulbright fellow in Cairo, Egypt, he researched the history of the Egyptian press.

He plays the violin and has toured with the orchestral band Mother Falcon.

The Marshall Project is a not-for-profit, non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering America’s criminal justice system. We’re just getting started, and plan to launch in the second half of 2014.

Sign up for email updates on our launch

The Marshall Project is founded on two simple ideas:

1) There is a pressing national need for excellent journalism about the U.S. court and prison systems. The U.S. has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. From spiraling costs, to controversial drug laws, to prison violence, to concerns about systemic racial bias, there is a growing bipartisan consensus that America’s criminal justice system is in dire need of reform. As traditional media companies cut back on enterprise reporting, the Marshall Project will serve as a dynamic digital hub for information and debate on the legal and corrections systems.

2) With growing awareness of the system’s failings, now is an opportune moment to launch a national conversation about criminal justice. There are numerous indications of the country’s appetite for reform. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder recently proposed sweeping changes to mandatory sentencing guidelines for drug offenses. In New York State, the Rockefeller drug laws were amended to give judges more discretion over sentencing. Marijuana is now decriminalized or legal in 16 states. And for the first time in decades, the national prison population is beginning to decline.

We believe honest storytelling is a powerful agent of social change. The Marshall Project will be an agenda-setting resource for up-to-the-minute news, in-depth reporting and commentary about criminal justice. Our goal is to help make criminal justice reform an important part of the national debate by the 2016 presidential campaign. Just as a “national conversation” dramatically altered the country’s views on gay marriage and education reform, so too can a national conversation help us confront our troubled courts and prisons.

The Marshall Project will combine the best of the old and the new in journalism. We will achieve our goals through the use of conventional investigative reporting and opinion writing, and embrace new technologies currently transforming the media, including interactive graphics, immersive digital stories, short video documentaries and content generated by our readers. We will curate the daily torrent of criminal justice news from publications around the country, highlight the work of advocacy groups on both the right and left, host debates, and drive a lively discussion on social media.

Our name is an homage to Supreme Court justice and crusading civil rights attorney Thurgood Marshall.

The Marshall Project will be funded with the support of foundations and donors.
For more information, contact us at info@themarshallproject.org.

Tim Golden directs the original reporting efforts of The Marshall Project, including the investigative work of its staff and contributing reporters.

Golden was previously a Senior Writer at The New York Times, where he spent two decades as an investigative reporter, foreign correspondent and national correspondent. He was the paper’s bureau chief in Mexico City, San Francisco and the Bronx, and also wrote for The New York Times Magazine.

Before joining The Times, Golden was a foreign correspondent for the Miami Herald, running its bureaus in Central America and South America. He began his career as a reporter covering foreign policy issues in the Washington Bureau of United Press International.

Among Golden’s journalism honors are two shared Pulitzer Prizes: the 1998 award for International Reporting, for articles about the effects of drug corruption in Mexico, and the 1987 prize for National Reporting, for stories on the Iran-Contra affair.

Golden graduated from Dartmouth College with high honors in 1984. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and sits on the advisory board of the Nieman Foundation. He was also a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, where he began writing an investigative history of Guantanamo for The Penguin Press. He has also worked as a consultant on several feature and documentary films, including the Academy Award winners “Traffic” and “Taxi to the Dark Side.”

Before joining the Marshall Project, Beth Schwartzapfel worked for a decade as a freelance journalist specializing in long form and narrative journalism.

She covered the criminal justice system, issues affecting the LGBTQ community, and health care for the underserved and disenfranchised—particularly substance use, addiction, and HIV/AIDS. She was awarded the June 2014 Sidney Award for “The Great American Chain Gang,” an exploration of prison labor, and her piece “Who Shot Valerie Finley? Why one man’s innocence is so hard to prove” was runner-up for a 2014 John Jay/H. F. Guggenheim Prize for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting.

Before beginning her journalism career, she worked in public health as an outreach worker and researcher in HIV and hepatitis C. She is a fellow of the MacDowell Colony, and earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the New School. She lives in Boston.

Gabriel Dance is a journalist and editor working at the cutting edge of digital news. He began his career in 2006 at The New York Times, eventually serving as chief multimedia producer. After more than four years creating award-winning projects, Dance left the Times to help launch the iPad-only news source, The Daily, as art director for news.

Dance joined The Guardian as interactive editor in 2012. Based in New York City, he helped launch the Guardian US, building a graphics team that garnered awards and recognition for interactive storytelling. He was part of a group of journalists who won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for coverage of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency.

Dance’s work has also won an Emmy award, an Alfred L. DuPont award, a World Press Photo award, and several awards from the Online News Association, the Society for News Design, and Malofiej, the premier information graphics competition.

Dana Goldstein is a journalist who covers social science, education, inequality, cities, and gender issues. Her book The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession, will be published by Doubleday in September 2014.

At The Marshall Project, Goldstein will cover research on criminal justice and will report on the school-to-prison pipeline.

She has received a Schwartz fellowship from the New America Foundation, a Puffin fellowship from the Nation Institute, and a Spencer Fellowship from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she was a writer and editor at The Daily Beast and The American Prospect. She contributes to Slate, The Atlantic, and other magazines, and is a graduate of Brown University.

Neil Barsky is founder and chairman of The Marshall Project.

Neil has enjoyed a distinguished career in the fields of journalism, finance and filmmaking. Neil co-founded the hedge fund Midtown Capital and founded Alson Capital Partners, which at its peak stood at $3.5 billion assets under management. After retiring from the investment business in 2009, Neil directed KOCH, the critically-acclaimed documentary film about New York City’s former mayor, which was released theatrically in 2013.

Previously, Neil was a reporter for the New York Daily News and The Wall Street Journal. He also worked as an equity research analyst for Morgan Stanley. He was the #1 ranked lodging and gaming analyst in the 1997 Institutional Investor magazine poll.

Neil serves on the boards of Youth Communication and Oberlin College, from which he graduated. He taught economics at Oberlin in 2009. Neil is chairman of the board of overseers of the Columbia Journalism Review and is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

As office manager, Crystal Hayes will direct the day-to-day operations of The Marshall Project, including human resources and IT. She has worked for Barsky Ventures, Alson Capital, and Morgan Stanley. Hayes is a graduate of St. John’s University.

Eli Stern serves as chief financial officer of The Marshall Project and as secretary and treasurer of the organization’s board of directors.

From 2010 to 2013, Stern served as CFO of Estekene Capital Management. Previously, he was the controller at Alson Capital. At Alson, Stern oversaw the fund’s accounting, taxation, securities lending, and prime brokerage relationships. From 2003 to 2004, he cofounded and was CFO of Double Arrow Capital Management, a fund of hedge funds with $50 million in assets. From 1999 to 2002, Stern was controller at Sentinel Advisors, a relative value global macro hedge fund with $200 million in assets. From 1997 through 1999, Stern was assistant controller at Laterman and Co., a multi-strategy hedge fund with $100 million in assets. He graduated summa cum laude from Baruch College with a B.B.A. in Accounting in 1997.

The Marshall Project is hiring

- Staff writer

- Director of Communications/PR

- Director of Development

- Intern

The Marshall Project is an equal opportunity employer which welcomes qualified applicants of all races, ethnicities, physical abilities, genders, and sexual orientations, including people who have been previously incarcerated.

The Marshall Project – Job listing
Director of Design

This position is no longer open for applications

Job title: Design Director
Location: New York, NY
Reporting to: Managing Editor, Digital

Responsibilites:

• Will design a cutting-edge interactive news site leveraging the best technologies and practices.
• Collaborate with the newsroom to brainstorm creative and innovative approaches to news.
• Create & maintain design style guide.

Experience and Skills:

• Experience working in journalism highly desirable
• Familiarity and experience with web design best practices
• Create mockups, wireframes, and visualizations as needed
• Fluency in HTML, CSS, and Javascript is highly desirable.

The Marshall Project is a not-for-profit, non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering America’s criminal justice system. The Marshall Project will combine the best of the old and the new in journalism. We will achieve our goals through the use of conventional investigative reporting and opinion writing, and embrace new technologies currently transforming the media, including interactive graphics, immersive digital stories, short video documentaries and content generated by our readers. We will curate the daily torrent of criminal justice news from publications around the country, highlight the work of advocacy groups on both the right and left, host debates, and drive a lively discussion on social media.

To Apply: Email Us
(marshallprojectinfo+designdirector@gmail.com)

The Marshall Project – Job listing
Director of Technology

Job title: Director of Technology
Location: New York, NY
Reporting to: Managing Editor, Digital

Responsibilites:

• Responsible for developing a cutting-edge interactive news site leveraging the best technologies and practices.
• Choose the technologies used and implement them to create a dynamic and robust news site.
• Collaborate with the newsroom to brainstorm coverage and creative and innovative approaches to news.
• Develop, implement and support top-quality applications and interactives that break new ground in journalism.

Experience and skills:

• Experience working in journalism
• Expertise across the software stack, and a intimate familiarity with deploying applications online.
• The candidate should have a deep understanding of the web and experience working within MVC framework. Candidates should be comfortable with web APIs and be able to integrate data, audio, and video into interactive experiences.

The Marshall Project is a not-for-profit, non-partisan news organization dedicated to covering America’s criminal justice system. The Marshall Project will combine the best of the old and the new in journalism. We will achieve our goals through the use of conventional investigative reporting and opinion writing, and embrace new technologies currently transforming the media, including interactive graphics, immersive digital stories, short video documentaries and content generated by our readers. We will curate the daily torrent of criminal justice news from publications around the country, highlight the work of advocacy groups on both the right and left, host debates, and drive a lively discussion on social media.

To Apply: Email Us
(marshallprojectinfo+techdirector@gmail.com)

THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED

The Marshall Project – Job listing
Audience editor

The Marshall Project seeks an audience editor with experience working in journalism.

The audience editor will be a key member of the team strategizing and managing our launch. He or she must have a proven track record of success in using social media to promote and facilitate great journalism. In addition to stellar writing and editing skills, the audience editor must be data savvy, in order to run analytics on our content, our audience, and the various storytelling approaches we try.

The audience editor will not only strategize around social media and reader engagement, but will implement the strategy day-to-day, acting as the voice of The Marshall Project on Twitter, Facebook, and in other online spaces. Excellent judgment and quick thinking will be crucial. He or she must make sure our content engages both criminal justice insiders and the broader public.

To Apply: Please send a resume and cover letter – with specific examples of successful audience engagement campaigns – to info@themarshallproject.org. Your name should be in the subject line of the email.

The Marshall Project – Job listing
Director of Communications/PR

The Marshall Project (TMP) seeks a Director of Communications/PR to develop TMP’s communications, public relations, and marketing strategy, including refinement of its mission statement and development and protection of TMP’s “brand”.

The CD will be responsible for contacting news media outlets, including television, radio, newsprint, and new technologies, that will showcase TMP for maximum public exposure, especially to key figures in media, advocacy, and government. Most importantly, the CD will develop creative strategies to alert a range of audiences to the need for urgency in addressing the deficiencies in the U.S. criminal justice system.

The CD will:

 
Candidates should have 5+ years of related experience and be prepared to work collaboratively.

To Apply: Please send a resume and cover letter – with specific examples of successful public relations campaigns – to info@themarshallproject.org. Your name should be in the subject line of the email.

THE MARSHALL PROJECT – JOB LISTING
DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR

The Marshall Project seeks a Development Director.

The Director of Development researches, identifies, and effectively cultivates individual and foundation prospects, drafts grant proposals, solicits and acquires gifts, tracks progress and status of grant and other applications and relationships, and ensures excellent stewardship for contributions from donors who support TMP at a leadership level (“Founding Funders”).

The Director of Development strengthens relationships between the organization and its major donors, designs and guides the implementation of appropriate solicitation strategies for Board members, and assists in the development and support of Board and Advisory Board members.

The Development Director also develops and oversees small and large events for fund-raising.

The Development Director should have 5+ years of relevant experience, including direct experience working with Board members and donors, and should expect to operate in a collaborative manner.

Please submit a cover letter, resume, and salary requirements to:

Crystal Hayes at chayes@themarshallproject.org

Thank you for your interest in the work of The Marshall Project.

Tom Meagher is a journalist, data nerd and news hacker.

Prior to joining the Marshall Project, Meagher was the data editor at Project Thunderdome, the central news hub for Digital First Media. There, he led a team of journalist-developers that built interactive news applications and supported computer-assisted reporting projects for the nation’s second-largest newspaper chain.

He co-founded Hack Jersey to bring together journalists and developers to work with open data and solve news problems in the Garden State.

Previously, Meagher spent eight years as a reporter and editor in New Jersey. He was the data editor at The Star-Ledger in Newark, after working at the New Jersey Local News Service and the Herald News. His first job in journalism was as a night cops reporter for a small daily paper in Kansas.

A graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Missouri-Columbia, Meagher lives with his wife and children in suburban New Jersey.

He’s covered cops and courts and built websites since the 1990s.

Andrew Cohen is a recovering attorney who has covered the legal beat as a journalist since 1997. He first joined CBS Radio News to cover the Oklahoma City bombing trials, spent 10 years on television with CBS News and other media outlets, and for the past four years has served as well as a contributing editor at the Atlantic, where his written work has focused upon the intersection of law and politics. He also is a Fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and the first-ever legal analyst at 60 Minutes.

During his 17 years on the beat, Cohen has written thousands of commentary or analysis pieces on hundreds of topics. Most recently, his work has focused upon the death penalty, the treatment of mentally ill inmates in the nation’s prisons, judicial nominations, sentencing reform, and the fight over voting rights.

Cohen’s work has won two American Bar Association Silver Gavel Awards, two Sigma Delta Chi Awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, two Edward R. Murrow Awards, and several other awards for his analysis and commentary of legal events and issues.

Raha Naddaf is News Editor at the Marshall Project. Naddaf began her career in 2005 at GQ Magazine, where she edited a variety of features ranging from personal essays to political profiles. In 2009, she wrote a piece for the magazine about the Iranian presidential election, which was listed as a notable essay in the Best American Essays series.

In 2010, Naddaf became Senior Editor at New York Magazine and edited features on criminal and social justice, including stories on false confessions, child services, “pre-crime,” and secret prison units, among others. She also edited personal essays and stories on food and pop culture, as well as installments of the Best Doctors, Summer, Where to Eat, and Reasons to Love New York annual issues.