The New York Times announces promotion for Christiaan Triebert

Christiaan Triebert (Photo credit: Sameer Khan)

We are very excited to announce that Christiaan Triebert has been promoted to senior video journalist in Visual Investigations.

During the past five years, Christiaan has been a trailblazer in open-source reporting and excelled at combining traditional approaches with advanced digital forensics. His work obtaining and analyzing digital materials — everything from visuals posted to social media and satellite imagery to radio communications and group-chat exchanges — has contributed to projects that led to several major awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes for investigations into Russia’s bombing of hospitals and the U.S. military’s problematic assessments of civilian casualty claims.

Christiaan has been one of the lead players in helping us develop what we call “proactive investigations,” which involve developing ambitious storylines from scratch and seeking out the visual and open-source evidence to support them. Some of those highlights include his tracking of shadowy oil shipments, his delving into the secretive drone program behind Ukraine’s strikes on the Kremlin, and his analysis of how a Haitian street gang rebranded itself on social media as a paramilitary unit in the wake of a coup.

He has also been voracious around breaking news, helping with fast-turn investigations into police misconduct and revealing Iran as the culprit in the downing of a civilian airliner.

Prior to joining The Times in 2019, Christiaan worked as a reporter and trainer for pioneering open-source investigative organizations like Bellingcat and Airwars. The Visual Investigations team made use of his extensive open-source reporting skills when we engaged Christiaan as a freelancer on several pieces in 2018, including a reconstruction of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and an apparent violation of protocols by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Those of us who have worked closely with Christiaan know all about his keen story instincts and dogged determination to find answers. Even under intense deadline pressure, he is a positive force among his colleagues and quick to offer support and encouragement. This promotion reflects Christiaan’s growth and invaluable presence on the Visual Investigations team as a reporter, storyteller and mentor. As well as generating ambitious reporting targets, in his new role he will help us stay at the forefront by assisting in the training and deployment of cutting-edge open-source reporting tools and methods.

Please congratulate Christiaan on this well-deserved promotion.