Tom Meagher is a seasoned investigative data journalist and editor with 14 years of experience, based in the New York City metro area. As Senior Editor at The Marshall Project since 2020, he oversees capital punishment coverage, mentors reporters, and leads data-driven investigations built from public records. He previously led digital and data teams, earning recognition for innovative editorial and product development work at the organization. His technical side surfaces in open-source journalism tools, with contributions to Klaxon and a Heroku-based Markov-chain Twitter bot, illustrating his bridge between newsroom and software engineering. He co-founded Hack Jersey to connect journalists and programmers and serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia Journalism School, teaching data reporting and investigative techniques. He holds a dual degree in journalism and English from the University of Missouri-Columbia and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University, combining reporting depth with methodological rigor.
14 years of coding experience
2 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.S.), Journalism, Master of Science (M.S.), Journalism at Columbia University - Graduate School of Journalism
An archive of a script to generate Markov chains and to post to an _ebooks account on Twitter using Heroku. No longer actively supported.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:4 releases, 51 commits, 21 PRs in 7 years
Contributions summary:Tom contributed to a Heroku-based Twitter bot project that generates Markov chains. Their work involved fixing bugs, improving code quality, and adding new features. Key contributions included enhancing HTML entity handling, refactoring code for multiple source accounts and static testing, and implementing various improvements to the tweet generation logic, like less frequent shouting and handling accounts with fewer tweets.
Klaxon enables reporters and editors to monitor scores of sites on the web for newsworthy changes.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:1 release, 1 review, 54 commits in 6 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Tom primarily contributed to the frontend and backend of the Klaxon project. They implemented features related to the display of HTML snapshots, including the addition of buttons for viewing and downloading the content. They also made backend changes, modifying models, controllers, and routes to support the new functionality and address bug fixes. The user's work spans both the user interface and the underlying data and functionality.
monitorscoressiteseditorsreporters
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