The New York Times names new senior producers on Reporter Video

John Pappas (Photo credit: Ryland Lovvorn)

We are excited to welcome Valentina Caval and John Pappas as senior producers on Reporter Video, a team of video journalists who produce compelling vertical video featuring New York Times reporters. These videos offer a visual experience of the biggest news stories and capture the newsroom’s expertise around the world.

As senior producers, John and Valentina will collaborate with newsroom desks, identify critical stories and guide video production to expand our coverage and formats. They will manage video journalists, lead story development, and help drive innovation in our visual storytelling. Valentina will also oversee video news coverage for the Video department on Saturdays (Tues-Sat schedule).

John Pappas first worked with The Times in 2019, producing and directing several episodes of The New York Times’s documentary series “The Weekly.” He has since produced and directed a number of feature documentaries for “The New York Times Presents,” including the twice Emmy-nominated “Move Fast & Vape Things,” produced alongside the former Times reporter Sheila Kaplan, which examined JUUL and the origins of the teen vaping crisis.

Most recently, he pitched in as a freelancer on Reporter Video to lead production on more than a dozen Donald Trump-focused reporter videos with Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, including the Manhattan criminal trial and subsequent campaign for re-election.

John has also worked with BuzzFeed News, Axios, ABC News, and writers like Steve Coll to bring their reporting to the screen. He recently produced an episode of the widely acclaimed series “Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids’ TV,” and he served as showrunner for Peacock’s three-part series “Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story,” a critical look at how Joe Francis and his ubiquitous early-00s brand affected women, employees and the culture writ large.

Valentina Caval

Valentina comes to The Times from Yahoo Finance, where, over the past six years, she covered key business news events, including the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Tesla’s going public, and the rise and fall of Sam Bankman Fried. In her last role, she led a team of 20 focused on daily finance news coverage. Valentina also launched and created the concept for five new shows at Yahoo, and led on-the-ground production for news coverage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Prior to Yahoo Finance, she worked at “HBO Real Sports With Bryant Gumbel.” Her pieces there included coverage of the devastation Australia’s production of coal is causing to the Great Barrier Reef and the impact Hurricane Harvey had on a small football town in Texas. While at HBO, Valentina was part of the team that won an Emmy for outstanding sports news anthology.

A graduate of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism in 2017 on the investigative journalism track with a focus on video, Valentina served as a duPont fellow and worked closely with the team at Columbia that organizes and judges the DuPont Awards.

Valentina and John start today, January 6.