‘Frontline’ Hires Chris Amico as Interactive Editor

By Mark Joyella 

PBS has cemented its relationship with Chris Amico, who will join “Frontline” full-time in the newly-created role of interactive editor. “It’s a new role for us that takes advantage of Chris’s reporting skills and his technical chops,” said “Frontline” managing editor Sarah Moughty. “He will oversee the technology side of our operation, supervising our new developer and designer hires.”

Amico began working with “Frontline” last year, creating “Ballot Watch,” a digital project that investigated changes to state voting laws. He stayed on to build the show’s interactive projects on Ebola and ISIS. As we’ve reported, “Frontline” is spending significant money to expand its profile in enterprise and digital reporting.

Amico is the founder of “Homicide Watch,” a digital project that tracks every homicide in Washington, D.C.

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Moughty’s hiring email, in full, is below:

From: Sarah Moughty
Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2015 9:07 PM
To: All Staff
Subject: New digital hire

Hi all

FRONTLINE’s digital team is thrilled to announce that as of Monday, Chris Amico has joined us full-time as Interactive Editor.  It’s a new role for us that takes advantage of Chris’s reporting skills and his technical chops. He will oversee the technology side of our operation, supervising our new developer and designer hires. (Hope to have more on that soon!)

As you know, Chris first joined us this summer for a six-week stint to help conceptualize and build Ballot Watch — our digital project investigating changes to state voting laws — and he stayed on to build our Ebola map and our interactive look at ISIS leadership.  At that point we had him hooked!

In his short time here, Chris has made some great contributions to our team. Now, as we build interactive projects, like the Ebola map or ISIS org chart, we are making them embeddable so that they’re easily shareable across the digital ecosystem. He’s also brought to us a concept called “structured journalism,” which rethinks the idea of the traditional reporter’s notebook, allowing us to open it up into a database and mine it for stories.  Heady stuff, but it’s a smart way of maximizing our reporting and you can see the results in the way we approached Ballot Watch.

We are happy to welcome Chris back to public media — before joining FRONTLINE he worked at NPR, WBUR and Newshour. And I think you are all familiar with Homicide Watch, the innovative website he started with his wife, Laura, to track every homicide in Washington DC. Homicide Watch has since expanded to Chicago, Trenton and our own backyard in Boston.

Chris will be sitting in his same spot in the newsroom but now has a fancy WGBH email address, so please add him to your distribution lists.

Best,

– s

 

Sarah Moughty

Managing Editor, Digital

http://www.pbs.org/frontline

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