Larry Buchanan

I report stories for The New York Times that use a variety of visual forms — maps, charts, diagrams, photographs, video — to explain the world better than words alone can.

What I Cover

I’ve spent more than a decade at The Times, covering stories for nearly every desk, including breaking news, the presidency of Donald J. Trump, gun violence in America and the last four Olympic Games. I’ve reported from six countries and more than a dozen states. I’ve skied with Mikaela Shiffrin (I fell), been on a balance beam with Simone Biles (I almost fell), covered a hurricane from an IHOP in Orlando and flown a drone over the Panama Canal.

My work often involves creating data sets where they didn’t exist before, like watching and categorizing all 1,150 episodes of “Tucker Carlson Tonight”; reading each of the 11,390 tweets Trump posted while in office; and aggregating more than 40,000 reader submissions to create an extremely detailed map of New York City’s neighborhoods.

My Background

I’ve always been interested in the intersection of art and journalism and how we can use both to better explain the world. At Indiana University, I merged a journalism major with a fine arts minor, taking classes in news writing, sculpture and color theory.

Before working for The Times, I reported and made interactive graphics for The New Yorker. I have also taught journalism at universities for nearly a decade, most recently in the graduate program at Columbia University.

I have won two Emmy Awards for my work on shows about two extremely different television hosts: Bob Ross and Tucker Carlson.

Journalistic Ethics

In addition to adhering to the standards set out in the Times Ethical Journalism Handbook, visuals have their own set of ethical standards.

How should we design an arrow that represents troop movements that visually matches what our reporting shows? Which Republican candidate in a crowded primary field gets to be represented by the color red on a map? Does this data want to be a line chart or a bar chart — or something else? These may, at first, all sound like aesthetic questions, but at their core they are journalistic ones. And they all have a different set of ethical questions we discuss on a case-by-case basis.

When producing visualizations, I always try to consult with multiple sources about the limits and caveats of the data. I ask for the raw data and try to recreate visualizations whenever possible. I annotate and explain what we want a reader to notice. I make sure the text and the visuals work together and also give context, much like a painting hanging in a museum and the text on the wall that accompanies it.

I try to actually show the thing I am describing or writing about, whenever I can. Clarity is the guiding principle of my work; aesthetics are secondary.

Hearing from readers is always a treat (even if you don’t like something). I try to respond to all the mail I get.

• Email: [email protected]

• X: @larrybuch

• Instagram: @larrybuch