Christiaan Triebert: open-source sleuth on Visual Investigations team

Christiaan Triebert is an investigative video journalist on The New York Times’s Visual Investigations team who blends social media sleuthing, satellite imagery, flight tracking and traditional reporting to reconstruct events; he has noted that small details, like the length of a shadow, can be crucial to pinpointing a site.

Triebert specializes in open-source reporting, verifying publicly available digital material and linking disparate elements to establish what happened. Since joining the newsroom in 2019 he has worked on more than 60 projects, including two Pulitzer Prize–winning investigations, and recent work tracking oil “ghost fleets” and an attack in the Caribbean involving an aircraft painted to look like a civilian plane.

He began using tools such as Google Maps and satellite imagery as a student to connect airstrikes to locations, attracting interest from groups like Bellingcat and ultimately The Times, which brought him onto its Visual Investigations effort after early reporting on Syria.

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