The annual SND Best of Digital News Design competition brings 21 professionals together across time zones using Zoom and other virtual platforms to judge the best work of 2021. The judges are broken into six groups — a features team, two graphics teams, two news teams and a product team. There also are three conflict judges.
Features
Gabriel Gianordoli, The New York Times
Mr. Gianordoli is the graphics and multimedia editor in the Digital News Design Department at The New York Times, where he has worked since 2018. He was named the World’s Best Designer by the Society for News Design in 2021. Mr. Gianordoli has worked on multiple interactive projects, including the Close Read series and the effort to track the coronavirus. He previously worked at The Wall Street Journal and holds a master’s degree in design and technology from Parsons School of Design.
Lily Mihalik Bhandari, Politico
Lily leads design and data strategy at Politico. She spends her time working with other talented journalists to craft best-in-class visual journalism, scalable storytelling tools, new platforms and more.
Mario Leite, ge.globo
Mario has worked in several news agencies since 1997. For the last 17 years, he has led the infographics team at ge.globo, the most-awarded Brazilian site in news and infographic design competitions in history.
Graphics 1
Jin Wu, Bloomberg News
Jin is an Asia-based visual journalist at Bloomberg News where she reports, designs and creates graphics to translate complex subjects into compelling stories. Previously, she was a part of the graphics team at The New York Times and Reuters. She is currently based in Hong Kong with her chubby cat Ko Ko.
Marcelo Duhalde, South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd.
Marcelo’s career as an infographic designer began in Chile in 1996. After 14 years of working in various media, he joined the Creative Department as deputy infographic editor at the Times of Oman newspaper in 2010, where he won multiple awards at competitions, including Society for News Design, MALOFIEJ, Wan Ifra and more. He currently serves as a senior infographic designer at the South China Morning Post.
Rebecca Pazos, The Straits Times
Rebecca is a proud mom of one and is dedicated to telling compassionate, human-centered data stories. Recently, she completed her master’s degree in visual tools with the University of Girona. Rebecca currently serves as the data visuals editor at The Straits Times, where she has worked for more than seven years.
Graphics 2
Darla Cameron, The Texas Tribune
Darla is the data visuals editor at The Texas Tribune in Austin, Texas, where she leads a team of journalist developers who use data to hold public officials accountable and create more transparency in the murky world of state politics. Her team’s visualizations help readers understand Texas better. Previously, she was a graphics editor at The Washington Post.
Hilary Fung, The San Francisco Chronicle
Hilary Fung leads the graphics and engineering team at the Chronicle. The team reports, designs and builds visualizations and interactive stories to cover the Bay Area. Previously, she has worked as a developer, designer and journalist at ProPublica, NPR, Quartz, HuffPost, ICIJ and The Seattle Times. She has taught at Northwestern University, The New School, the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism and the Lede Program at Columbia University.
Kaeti Hinck, CNN
Kaeti is a visual journalist, editor and newsroom leader. She is currently the executive editor for data and visual journalism at CNN Digital. Before joining CNN, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, researching how neuroscience and psychology can inspire humane platform design, fight misinformation and inform the broader news ecosystem. Previously, she was an editor at The Washington Post, where she led an interdisciplinary team of visual journalists, developers, and data reporters. Before joining The Post, she worked as the design director at the Institute for Nonprofit News. She has explored the power of data, visual storytelling and technology in newsrooms for almost two decades.
News 1
Brittany Renee Mayes, The Washington Post
Brittany is a senior full-stack software engineer for elections on The Washington Post’s Newsroom Engineering team. She joined The Post as a graphics reporter in June 2018 and was a part of the inaugural class of Opportunity Year fellows in 2020 before joining the engineering department. Previously, she was a news applications developer on the NPR visuals team and attended the New York Times Student Journalism Institute. She’s a Tar Heel, calls herself a romance novel connoisseur — she’s read more than 300 in the last three years — and has recently picked up rock climbing.
Corinne Chin, Associated Press
Corinne Chin is the director of news talent for recruitment at the Associated Press, working to bring new, diverse journalists to the AP. She also is a national Emmy Award-winning video journalist whose storytelling explores race, gender, immigration and other social issues. As a senior video journalist at The Seattle Times, Corinne focused on in-depth digital video projects like “Beyond the Border,” a series of visual stories exploring asylum, deportation and femicide on the U.S.-Mexico border, supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting; and “Under Our Skin,” an interactive documentary exploring the words we use – and misuse – to talk about race in America. Corinne founded and led The Seattle Times Diversity & Inclusion Task Force, growing the team from six journalists in 2017 to more than three dozen in 2022. She also previously worked as a senior video producer for CNN. Corinne’s body of work has been recognized by the National News and Documentary Emmys, National Edward R. Murrow Awards, the Online News Association, National Press Photographers Association’s Best of Photojournalism, Pictures of the Year International and more. Corinne is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University (MSJ and BSJ), the ASNE/NLA Emerging Leaders Institute and the Poynter-NABJ Leadership Academy for Diversity. As an alumna of the Poynter Leadership Academy for Women, Corinne offers free coaching to women and non-binary journalists via digitalwomenleaders.com. Corinne also is passionate about making journalism a more inclusive industry through trauma-informed safety training, completing a Next Gen Safety Training fellowship through the International Women’s Media Foundation. She is a co-director of the Asian American Journalists Association’s affinity group Women and Non-Binary Voices, and she is a past president of AAJA Seattle.
Luke Knox, ESPN
Luke is an art director with the visual storytelling team at ESPN, where he focuses on story development, custom digital projects and data visualization. His work has been recognized by the Society for News Design, the Webby Awards and other organizations. Prior to joining ESPN in 2015, he worked at The Boston Globe.
News 2
Joanna Kao, Financial Times
Joanna S. Kao is the tech lead of the Financial Times’ visual journalism team and holds a computer science degree from MIT and an MBA from IE Business School. She was previously a data visualization journalist at the Financial Times’ New York bureau and a multimedia reporter and interactive developer at Al Jazeera America. She also taught data visualization at Columbia Journalism School, as well as developed and taught two new accessibility courses for the New School and Parsons School of Design. She champions accessible design and enjoys living at the intersection of computer science, design and journalism.
Marie-Louise Timcke, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Marie-Louise is a programming journalist and heads the Datajournalism Team of Süddeutsche Zeitung. From her studies of data journalism at the TU Dortmund University, she founded Journocode, an initiative for more data literacy and IT skills in journalism.
Tara Herman, The Guardian
Tara is executive editor for design at The Guardian. Most days she has her digital hat on, wrangling reactive news stories, coordinating cross-platform investigations and series and working with a brilliant team of creatives across digital and print. Though, she sometimes disappears for months (years!) to project manage and deliver redesigns — from the last broadsheet through the Berliner and tabloid versions of the newspaper, and most recently the new Saturday magazine. She also looks after newly qualified journalists from underrepresented groups, including those from a lower socio-economic background, BAME, LGBTQ+ and those with a disability.
Product
Elan Kiderman Ullendorff, The Marshall Project
Elan is a Pittsburgh-based designer and educator currently leading the product team at a nonprofit criminal justice news organization called The Marshall Project and teaching at Chatham University and Index. Elan runs a pop-up design studio that funnels its profits to mutual aid projects, and obsesses over the least-visited corners of the internet in the newsletter Deep Sea Diving.
Emily Swelgin, The 19th News
Emily is the chief product officer at The 19th, an independent, nonprofit newsroom covering the intersection of gender, politics and policy. Her team aims to identify and solve their audiences’ most impactful needs — from loading the website on a slow connection to finding stories that are important to them. She previously worked as a designer/developer at The Texas Tribune, The Washington Post and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Mara Corbett, Gannett
Mara is a designer and project manager based out of Austin, Texas. She works alongside Gannett’s 120-plus local markets and USA TODAY to tell stories with impact across digital platforms. Previously, she designed special projects for the GateHouse Media innovation team.
Conflict Judges
Elliot Bentley, The Wall Street Journal
Elliot is a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal’s graphics department, specializing in interactive graphics and data visualization. Since joining WSJ in 2014, he has worked on dozens of visual stories on subjects ranging from business to politics to entertainment. Prior to, he created oTranscribe, a widely used web app for transcribing interviews.
Kennedy Elliott, National Geographic
Kennedy is a developer and journalist, and manages digital graphics and immersive stories at National Geographic. She covers a range of topics relating to science, climate and culture. She has previously worked at The Washington Post and the Associated Press.
Xaquín G.V., Visualization for Transparency Foundation
Xaquín is a visual journalist and data visualization expert, and Roi’s dad. He has worked at El Mundo, The New York Times, National Geographic and The Guardian, where he led the award-winning visuals team. His latest interests are graphicacy, emotion in data experiences, data visualization for change and the automation of narrative visualizations.