It is the announcement of the nomination of Meaghan Looram as Director of Photography of the New York Times. She will follow Michele McNally who is retiring after 13 years leading the photography department. Under her direction, the Times won many awards, among those 6 Pulitzer prizes for photography, five of those in the past 5 years.
Times Editor Dean Baquet and Managing Editor Joseph Kahn made the following announcement:
“We are pleased to announce that Meaghan Looram, a gifted journalist and accomplished visual leader, will be our new Director of Photography.
As one of Michele McNally’s critical deputies for eight years, Meaghan helped lead the department as The Times elevated visual journalism, both in the daily report and through ambitious enterprise, to a new standard in our industry.
Meaghan has overseen a large staff of photo editors, photographers and freelancers who routinely produce much of the best photojournalism in the world. She has recruited and developed many of our most talented photo editors and has helped create and maintain a photographic aesthetic that has contributed significantly to the identity of The Times.
Meaghan’s achievements stretch back many years, extending into some early innovative storytelling efforts. She helped The Times win two Emmys, one for “A Year at War,” a series chronicling a battalion’s yearlong deployment, and another for “One in 8 Million,” a multimedia exploration of the lives of individual New Yorkers. In both cases, Meaghan formed creative partnerships with Video, Design, Metro and International and helped shape the reporting as well as the imagery. She has been a leader on many of our signature visual efforts like “Invisible Child” and “The Way North.” She has also overseen the annual Year in Pictures for the last decade and has been responsible for the crack visual teams covering red carpets at the Oscars, the Tonys and the Met Gala. More recently, she has played a major role in some of our strongest Climate projects, like “Easter Island Is Eroding” and the Carbon’s Casualtiesseries.
Our search for a new Director of Photography produced many internal and external candidates, and we heard from major players in the industry, which wasn’t much of a surprise. Still, the prestige surrounding our Photo department only adds to the excitement about the desk’s future and about Meaghan’s tenure.
She will take over leadership of the desk at a time when we plan to make our visual journalists, spanning photo, video, graphics and design, more integrated than they have been in the past. We’ll look to Meaghan to work closely with those teams and others to make the full range of visual storytelling an even more critical part of our journalistic excellence in every part of the report.
Together with Meaghan, we’ll have more to say soon about putting together an all-star photojournalism team. We’re confident that under her leadership, the Photo department will not only continue its tradition of excellence developed by Michele, but will become a critical core of our plans to make visual narratives a signature product of our newsroom.
Please join us in welcoming Meaghan to her new role and to the newsroom’s leadership.”
- Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn
