Biography

Geoff McGhee specializes in interactive data visualization and multimedia storytelling. He is a veteran of the multimedia and infographics staffs at The New York Times, Le Monde and ABCNews.com. Geoff spent a Knight Fellowship year at Stanford in 2009-2010 researching data visualization, which resulted in the acclaimed video documentary “Journalism in the Age of Data,” which has been widely used in classrooms. At the Bill Lane Center for the American West, Geoff is responsible for the Center’s websites and digital publications such as the ‘...& the West’ blog he co-produces with Felicity Barringer, and the EcoWest series of environmental data trackers on western U.S. wildfires, drought, and snowpack, among others. Geoff has also worked on center projects like Water in the West, a joint program with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and the center’s Rural West Initiative, which conducted research and reporting on the alternative energy boom, as well as retracing a 100-year-old survey of country life originally commissioned by President Theodore Roosevelt. He also contributed a chapter on rural broadband internet issues to the Rural West Initiative’s 2015 book, Bridging the Distance: Common Issues of the Rural West. Geoff oversees the center’s Western Journalism and Media Fellowships program, which brings journalists to the center for brief collaborations and supports travel and research expenses for work on critical western issues. Previously, Geoff worked as the multimedia editor at Le Monde in France from 2008-2009 and at The New York Times from 2000 to 2008 as Graphics Editor, Enterprise Editor, Chief Multimedia Producer and Video Journalist. He also worked at ABC News from 1999-2000. He was the lead writer on National Geographic’s “Data Points” column on information visualization in 2015-16. He received his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University in 1999. His personal site is at geoffmcghee.com.