Rob Barry directs data journalism at The Wall Street Journal, leading a team of reporters specializing in data analysis and programming. His work has exposed nation-state hacking, Medicare fraud and the inner workings of social media algorithms. A Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of multiple Gerald Loeb Awards, his investigations have sparked congressional probes and policy changes.
Tom McGinty is an investigative reporter for The Wall Street Journal in New York City. Mr. McGinty specializes in computer-assisted reporting using spreadsheets and database managers to analyze and mine statistical data and public records databases. He works on a variety of topics and often collaborates with other reporters.
Before joining the Journal in January 2008, Mr. McGinty was a staff writer for Newsday from 2001 to 2007. He was also the training director at Investigative Reporters and Editors, an organization based at the University of Missouri. From 1993 to 1998 he was reporter at the Times of Trenton.
Mr. McGinty earned a bachelor’s degree in public relations and journalism from Utica College of Syracuse University.
Caitlin Ostroff is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who combines shoe-leather reporting with computer programming and data analysis to tell in-depth and investigative stories.
She previously covered crypto companies out of New York and European financial markets out of The Journal’s London bureau.
Before coming to The Journal, she worked as a data reporter for the Miami Herald, where she used Python and other programming languages to gather information on elections, medical malpractice and efforts to sell access to President Trump through his Florida residence and club, Mar-a-Lago. Her reporting on the latter led her to co-author the book “The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency.” She was named a finalist for the Livingston Award for national reporting.
She is a graduate of the University of Florida, where she majored in journalism and political science.
Paul Overberg is a Washington-based reporter on The Wall Street Journal’s investigations team. Paul specializes in analyzing data and public records to find stories and collaborates with reporters who cover many subjects. He has taught at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and served as a senior fellow for the Center for Health Journalism at the University of Southern California. Before joining the Journal, he worked as a data journalist at USA Today. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Rutgers University.
Shane Shifflett is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal covering topics at the intersection of finance and climate change. His stories have explored how regulators, small businesses, tech companies and debt collectors influence the economy. He joined the Journal in 2016 as a graphics reporter building interactive data visualizations. In 2019, he was among the paper’s finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.
Before joining the Journal, he worked for the Huffington Post on a range of topics from the business of college athletics to the World Bank’s policies protecting indigenous people. He began his career in California covering judicial conflicts of interest, local elections and transit for the Center for Investigative Reporting and the Bay Citizen.
John West reports the news with code, offering novel computational solutions to hard journalistic problems across a wide range of topics. His work for the Journal has won several awards, including a Gerald Loeb and a Pulitzer Prize.
Previously, he worked as a researcher at Cortico and the MIT Media Lab and as a writer and engineer at Quartz. His first book, “Lessons and Carols, ” was published in 2023, and his second book, a digital memento mori, is expected in 2026
Brian Whitton is a computational journalist at The Wall Street Journal, based in New York City. He builds scrapers, databases, interfaces, and other tools that are needed in the course of pursuing and telling a story.
His work has been recognized by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (Sabew). Brian joined the Journal in 2019 as a newsroom engineer with WSJ Noted.
Prior to joining the Journal, Brian was an engineering manager at New York Public Radio where he led the digital product team in producing new websites and applications for the Gothamist and WNYC newsrooms. Before that, he spent time at the MIT Media Lab as a visiting researcher working on software for community schools. Brian’s freelance portfolio includes work for David Byrne of the Talking Heads and Val Kilmer.