The New York Times announces new visual roles on International

We’re very happy to announce that two talented visual journalists will move from New York to join the International desk: Weiyi (Dawn) Cai in Seoul and Lauren Leatherby in London. Together they will help us expand the ambitions of our team of visual journalists covering the world.

Dawn will lead multimedia coverage of Asia as the new senior editor for visuals. She will bring her tremendous range as a journalist to help shape how we cover Asia, and she’ll be a critical voice for how we approach visual journalism across the international report. She’ll work with two stellar visual reporters in Seoul, Pablo Robles and Agnes Chang, and collaborate widely with correspondents, editors and video and photojournalists.

Dawn has a rare combination of strengths as a reporter, designer and developer, which she has shown in her work for the graphics department. She was a key author on stories that showed how Notre-Dame was nearly destroyed; how Tucker Carlson fuels extremism; how the world failed to stop Covid; why a Bronx fire burned and why the Mexico City subway collapsed. Before she joined The Times, Dawn worked as a graphics journalist at The Washington Post and at Reuters, based in Singapore, where she covered the Rohingya crisis and North Korea’s missile program.

Lauren will cover Europe and the Middle East as a visual editor based in London. She is a terrific data and multimedia reporter who will broaden how we cover critical subjects, anchoring visual coverage of major storylines and collaborating with reporters around the world. She’ll work alongside Josh Holder, who has become a critical part of the London newsroom.

Lauren combines dedicated beat reporting with nuanced analyses of difficult datasets, videos and other media. Her reporting and graphics have proven essential to our understanding of the pandemic, chronicling how America lost one million people to Covid, how I.C.U.s filled up and how geography and politics shaped outbreaks. She helped document how, minute by minute, the Jan. 6 rally turned into a riot. Before she joined The Times, she was a data journalist at the Financial Times and at Bloomberg, where she produced a series of fascinating cartograms about land use in America and this explainer on who actually votes.

Lauren and Dawn will start in the new year. Please welcome them!