Tom Meagher
Senior Editor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
New York City Metropolitan Area United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTom Meagher is an investigative data journalist and senior editor with 14 years of experience building data-driven reporting and digital products at The Marshall Project. He oversees capital punishment coverage and the long-running "Death Sentences" series while leading reporting teams, managing copy desks, and creating bespoke databases from public records to power deep investigations. Formerly managing the newsroom's digital and data efforts, he led award-winning projects that combined interactive graphics, product development, and visual journalism. Tom blends hands-on full-stack development—contributing to tools like Klaxon for monitoring web changes and maintaining a Heroku-based Markov tweet bot—with rigorous editorial oversight. He also teaches investigative and data- reporting at Columbia Journalism School and co-founded Hack Jersey to connect journalists and developers, reflecting a persistent focus on improving public-data-driven journalism.
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 JournalismUniversity of Missouri
Stackoverflow
1reputation
0reached
0answers
0questions
Github Skills (23)
markov-chain10
python10
rails10
twitter-api10
html10
heroku10
ruby-on-rails10
back-end-development9
javascript9
css9
front-end-development9
backend9
apidoc8
api8
testing7
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
tommeagher/heroku_ebooks
Aug 2013 - Jul 2020
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
Back-end DeveloperContributions: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.
herokuebookspythonmod-manageraccount
themarshallproject/klaxon
Mar 2016 - Nov 2022
Klaxon enables reporters and editors to monitor scores of sites on the web for newsworthy changes.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions: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
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.