T-Squared: Matt Adams, Dan Keemahill and Carlos Nogueras join The Texas Tribune

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We have some terrific hiring updates to share at The Texas Tribune. Matt Adams is our new director of audience growth and engagement. Dan Keemahill has returned to the Tribune as a data reporter on the Texas Tribune-ProPublica investigative team. And Carlos Nogueras will be our first-ever Permian Basin reporter, through a partnership with Report for America.

Matt is acting supervisor for audience engagement at NPR. He spent the past three years experimenting with social audio, producing live breaking news conversations with the NPR audience, and working across multiple desks and broadcast teams sharing on-air audio on social platforms. He produced over 100 Twitter Spaces conversations, including collaborating with live broadcast audio teams to share the State of Union and the Jan. 6 committee hearings live. Over the past several weeks, his team was crucial in rethinking the future of NPR on Twitter.

Before NPR, Matt was a photo editor and led National Geographic's photo community, known as Your Shot, which allowed readers to share their best photography and converse with one another. More than a million registered users uploaded more than 11 million photographs on the site seeking the feedback of National Geographic’s photo editors and photographers. Through the site’s Best in the World assignment, National Geographic Traveler ran two community-submitted photos on its cover for the first time.

Matt will start remotely on June 5 and move to Austin this summer. He grew up in Pittsburgh. He graduated from Point Park University in 2007 with a photojournalism degree and received a master of arts in visual communication and multimedia production from Ohio University in 2012.

Dan joined the Tribune on April 10. He reports to data visuals editor Chris Essig and is edited by Zahira Torres, senior editor for the ProPublica-Tribune partnership. In his role, Dan will analyze large, complicated datasets as he works with other reporters on the team to tell ambitious investigative stories.

Dan grew up in Sacramento. He is a 2013 graduate of Northwestern University and has worked at several local and national publications throughout his 10-year career, including a stint on the Tribune’s data visuals team in 2013. Most recently, he worked as a data journalist at USA Today.

As part of an investigation into the origins of transgender sports bills, Dan helped his team identify common phrases and keywords in 70 pieces of legislation filed by lawmakers nationwide. He also helped extract and analyze metadata from thousands of images for a story looking at China's secret Uyghur detention system.

Before working at USA Today, Dan spent four years as a web developer at the Austin American-Statesman, where he made visualizations, helped reporters go through datasets and created custom pages for in-depth projects. While there, he analyzed publicly available data on elected officials in Texas for a project looking at how underrepresented Hispanic people are in local politics.

Carlos will join The Texas Tribune’s regions desk July 10 in partnership with Report For America and cover the energy-rich Permian Basin. He will report to Nic Garcia, who edits our regions team.

Carlos, a Puerto Rico native, graduated from the Berklee College of Music in 2016 and received a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Puerto Rico, in San Juan, last year. He joins the Tribune after completing a fellowship at Philadelphia’s Al Día, a news organization dedicated to the city’s Hispanic community. While there, Carlos covered local government and political issues.

The Tribune’s regions team, established last year, covers a host of topics — mental health, schools, broadband, elections — from the ground in cities and towns outside the Texas’ largest metro areas.

Carlos is the second Tribune reporter to be hired in partnership with Report For America, a national service program that places emerging journalists in newsrooms across the country to cover essential beats. Often considered the energy capital of the U.S., the Permian Basin includes more than 7,000 oil fields between Texas and New Mexico. The 17-county area stretches from Gaines to Terrell and Reeves to Glasscock.

“I believe in the power of local reporting and its ability to shift the power dynamics between communities and elected officials,” Carlos said. “It was local journalism that shaped how I viewed and understood the world around me.”

Disclosure: Northwestern University - Medill School of Journalism has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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