The Washington Post’s Matt Callahan promoted to deputy design director

Announcement from Creative Director for the newsroom Greg Manifold:

We are pleased to announce that Matt Callahan has been promoted to deputy design director.

Matt has been a vital member of the Design Department leadership team since becoming an editor in 2017. In his expanded role, he will lead a team of designers while also infusing his thinking across the department on approaches for our most important presentations. In addition, Matt will continue to work across the newsroom, partnering with the product and engineering teams as the point person for the news development team. The team, which Matt has led since its inception in 2020, sits at the intersection of the newsroom and engineering and works to strengthen the capacity of the custom story template while also taking on projects that expand the scope of our digital storytelling.

Matt is a natural collaborator and problem solver who understands the role of design in driving digital storytelling. He will continue working with newsroom stakeholders to ensure that our presentations match our readers’ needs. Matt will work closely with fellow deputy design directors Brian Gross and Amy Cavenaile to ensure we are telling stories seamlessly.

As an editor, Matt has been involved with countless quick-turn and key enterprise presentations, including the Pandora Papers, the Afghanistan Papers, the DEA pills database and the police shootings project. He also led a multidisciplinary team of journalists as the lead designer and developer for the launch of Google’s web stories (Stamp), during which time they produced hundreds of visual stories optimized for mobile web — a framework we use regularly today. As a designer, Matt’s work included “Why my guitar gently weeps,” “A Marine‘s convictions,” “The Polaroids of the cowboy poet,” the oral history of when Run-DMC met Aerosmith and “America’s natural heritage.”

Matt lives in Bloomingdale with his wife (and fellow Postie) Becca Clemons. He graduated from Indiana University and previously worked at the Tampa Bay Times after internships at the Boston Globe and the New York Times. He joined The Post in 2014.

Please join us in congratulating him on his new role, which started today.