Vanessa Martínez joins Data and Graphics Department
As part of the rebuilding of the Los Angeles Times, Executive Editor Norman Pearlstine, Managing Editor Scott Kraft and Deputy Managing Editor Sewell Chan made the following announcement.
We are happy to announce that Vanessa Martínez, a gifted News Desk editor who has helped program our home page for the last two years, is joining our Data and Graphics Department as a reporter.
Even while sending out breaking news alerts, optimizing articles for search engines, and collaborating with our early morning news crew, Martínez has found time to create ambitious visual journalism. She co-produced Rosanna Xia’s project on California’s disappearing coastline. She developed Marisa Gerber’s story on a support group for transgender women. Last year, she helped with our account of the eight families who fueled Gavin Newsom’s ascent. Martínez has also used her fluency in Spanish to help produce the Spanish-language versions of major enterprise stories.
A native of Whittier, Martínez graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 2013 with degrees in communications and Spanish. For nearly three years, she was a page designer and editor at the Southern California News Group in Monrovia. Along the way, she studied advanced web page design and programming at Cypress College and Fullerton College, honing her skills in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. She then worked as a digital news producer at the Seattle Times, where she also produced enterprise stories and built interactive maps and projects, before returning home in 2017.
Under the leadership of Len de Groot and Ben Welsh, the Data and Graphics Department has been producing ambitious journalism that attracts and retains subscribers, this week’s 101 Restaurants list being just one recent example. Martínez starts on Jan 13.
