Welcome Nieman Lab’s new staff writers, Andrew Deck and Neel Dhanesha

I’m so happy to announce that we’ve added two new full-time writers to the Nieman Lab team. Both of them are starting today.

Andrew Deck is our new AI staff writer, focused on the intersection of generative AI and journalism. Previously, he was a staff reporter at Rest of World, an international nonprofit publication he helped launch in 2020 focused on the impact of technology in non-Western countries. Andrew began his career in Japan, where he contributed to English-language publications including The Japan Times and was an assistant editor at the Tokyo-based magazine Metropolis.

Andrew is interested in covering labor displacement in newsrooms, training data contracts between media companies and AI developers, issues reporting on synthetic media, and overall the ethics of using AI in the editorial process.

Neel Dhanesha is our new general staff writer. He is a writer and audio producer from Bangalore. Before joining the Lab, he was a founding staff writer at the climate news startup Heatmap. He has also been a reporter at Vox, a fellow at Audubon magazine, and an assistant producer at Radiolab, where he helped produce The Other Latif, a series about one detainee’s journey to Guantanamo Bay. He is a graduate of the Literary Reportage program at NYU.

Neel intends to rove widely in his coverage for the Lab, but is especially interested in writing about science and climate reporting and the audio industry.

Andrew and Neel both live in Brooklyn and will be working for Nieman Lab remotely full-time. (This means we can now say we have an NYC bureau, IMO.) They join Sarah Scire, Josh Benton, Sophie Culpepper, Hanaa’ Tameez, and me. We’re so excited to have them on board.