John Templon

Experience

BuzzFeed News

Data Editor, January 2022-July 2022

Investigative Data Reporter, June 2014-January 2022

  • Lead data reporter for BuzzFeed News for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist FinCEN Files, along with colleagues at  BuzzFeed News, ICIJ and more than a 100 partner organizations around the globe, to show how the world’s  largest banks and the government are failing to stop global corruption.

  • Write in-depth investigations on topics such as tennis, figure skating, politics, crypto, and immigration.

  • Winner: French-American Foundation’s Immigration Journalism Award, The Drum Online Media Awards

  • Finalist: Pulitzer Prize (International Reporting, 2021 for the FinCEN Files), Data Journalism Awards, British Journalism Awards, Online News Association, Ellie Awards, Scripps Howard Awards, UK National Press Awards

Adjunct Professor, Columbia University 

New York, NY, 9/18-Present

  • Advise data journalism graduate students on masters projects.

  • Meet weekly to discuss challenges and obstacles with the goal of producing a long-form work of journalism. 

Adjunct Professor, The City University of New York 

New York, NY, 6/18-Present

  • Teach interactive journalism graduate class about investigating algorithms.

  • Execute AI Monitors program with grant from the Knight Foundation, including teaching community journalists and doing a series of video interviews. 

Owner and Editor in Chief, NYC Buckets 

New York, NY, 3/11-4/18 

  • Founded college basketball site in 2011, focusing on statistical analysis and mid-majors in the Northeast.

  • Program in Python, MySQL, PHP, HTML and CSS for site design, statistical analysis and additional features.

  • Edit and manage a team of writers. Together the team covered more than 100 games in 2016-17.

  • Represent site in radio, television and print interviews, including Chicago Sun-Times and Wall Street Journal.

Product Specialist, Narrative Science 

New York, NY, 4/10-6/14 

  • First employee at Chicago-based Artificial Intelligence start-up that took structured data and transformed it into stories and insight. The company was bought by Salesforce in 2021.

  • Co-holder of seven patents around the core narrative generation technology.

  • Built automatically generated content for clients in verticals such as real estate, sports and politics.

  • Provided innovative journalism insight to improve content creation platform.

Freelance work has also been published in The Times of Trenton, ESPN Insider, Chicago Tribune, Wilmington Star News, Tampa Bay Times, Scout.com, and College Basketball Prospectus 

Education

Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, Masters of Science in Journalism, June 2009

The Catholic University of America, Bachelor of Arts in Physics, May 2006, Magna cum laude