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.
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.
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: larry.buchanan@nytimes.com
X: @larrybuch
Instagram: @larrybuch
Is this how one of the world’s greatest cities still deals with garbage? Larry Buchanan, one of the New York Times reporters who walked miles around the city pondering trash for this story, explains what will be required to take New York’s trash bags off the street.
By Larry Buchanan, Karen Hanley and Ruru Kuo
Yesterday’s hippies have become today’s seniors — and they’re still voting Democratic.
To understand a messy problem, The Times needed to look at the city from a different perspective, one where garbage sits at the foreground.
By Emily Badger and Larry Buchanan
A Times analysis used preliminary data to estimate the force of the impact on the Baltimore bridge. It involved “more energy than you can really get your mind around,” an expert said.
By Aatish Bhatia and Francesca Paris
Is this how one of the world's greatest cities still deals with garbage? Here’s what will be required to take New York’s trash bags off the street.
By Emily Badger and Larry Buchanan
This was featured in live coverage.
By Larry Buchanan, Evan Grothjan, Jon Huang, Yuliya Parshina-Kottas, Adam Pearce and Karen Yourish
Do they all finish happily? We don’t want to ruin the ending for you.
By Alicia Parlapiano, Aatish Bhatia, Larry Buchanan, Claire Cain Miller, Courtney Cox, Margot Sanger-Katz, Francesca Paris and Eve Washington
We asked New Yorkers themselves to map their neighborhoods and to tell us what they call them. The result is probably the most detailed map of the city’s neighborhoods ever compiled.
By Larry Buchanan, Ruru Kuo and Claire Hogan
We’ve added 36 new neighborhood names, and we’ll continue to update them.
By Larry Buchanan and Josh Katz
More than 37,000 New Yorkers told us where their neighborhoods start and end. We mapped them all.
By Larry Buchanan, Josh Katz, Eve Washington and Rumsey Taylor