ProPublica announced on Monday that it has hired Sergio Hernandez and Nathaniel Lash as news applications developers. They will join the organization’s award-winning news apps team to design and develop interactive graphics and databases that help readers make sense of complex information and understand how it relates to them.
Sergio Hernandez first came to ProPublica as a reporting intern in 2012, when he contributed to projects investigating prosecutorial misconduct in New York, racial inequities in presidential pardons and flaws in America’s death investigation system. In 2013, he led an investigation for ProPublica documenting criminal prosecutions of people living with HIV/AIDS.
For the last six years Hernandez has worked at CNN as a reporter with its investigative unit and, most recently, a data editor. He was part of the reporting team behind “Destroyed,” a nationwide investigation into police departments’ destruction of rape kits, and led efforts to develop data journalism standards and expand the use of FOIA. He also launched the newsroom’s first secure tips line and developed newsroom tools for reporters. He previously worked as a reporter for Mashable and a senior editor at The Week magazine. Hernandez starts at ProPublica on August 8.
Nathaniel Lash comes to ProPublica from The New York Times, where he was a graphics reporter for the Opinion section. Since joining the Times in 2020, he has told interactive stories about the policy and science around COVID-19 and climate change.
Before the Times, Lash was an investigative reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he covered Philadelphia’s opioid crisis and child welfare system. As a data reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, he analyzed federal aviation records to show how budget carrier Allegiant Airlines' planes were many times more likely to fail in-flight than those of other carriers — a series that won him and his co-reporters the Gerald Loeb Award for investigative reporting. He was also the data reporter for the Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning series Failure Factories, which revealed how a Florida school board abandoned schools in the district’s Black neighborhoods, turning them into the state’s worst elementaries. This work was also awarded with the Livingston Award, Worth Bingham Prize, Philip Meyer Award and IRE Medal. Lash starts at ProPublica on August 22.
