A New Open-Source Reporter Joins Visual Investigations

We are very excited to announce that Bora Erden, who has worked on the Graphics desk as a multimedia editor for the last three years, will join Video's Visual Investigations team later this month.

Bora joined the Graphics department in October 2023 and has applied investigative and spatial reporting techniques to a wide array of subjects, including immigration, aviation disasters, wars, the Olympics and the World Cup.

Bora untangled the confusing array of federal agencies deployed on the streets of Los Angeles during the protests against ICE. He worked on an analytics pipeline that allowed us to dispel false claims regarding crowd sizes on the 2024 campaign trail. He pored over dozens of satellite images to tally the damage to American military sites in the war with Iran.

Over the summer, he shot photographs and helped develop and produce our immersive explanations of key World Cup goals . Malika Khurana, a Graphics colleague and teammate on the World Cup coverage, said, "His willingness and confidence to take on any challenge has been inspiring, and he is usually the first to try to convince me I could do the same."

In his new role as an open-source reporter, Bora will focus on ambitious investigative work across competitive news stories and mid- and long-range projects, with the ultimate goal of continuing to expand how we use visuals as evidence. He'll use a combination of open-source discovery techniques and cutting-edge computational reporting methods to uncover hidden clues and connect the dots in the pursuit of accountability.

Prior to The Times, Bora was at SITU, an architecture group that specializes in investigative reconstruction. There, he was a senior researcher and technical lead, with a focus on spatial analysis. For an investigation with PBS's "Frontline" and The Associated Press, he developed a video management system that allowed reporters to review and analyze CCTV footage in Ukraine. In 2019, he built an interactive platform for presenting evidence in a court case at the International Criminal Court, which established the first such immersive experience in an international criminal proceeding.

Bora grew up in Paris and has a bachelor's degree in cognitive science as well as a master's degree in computer science, both from Stanford University.

Please join me in congratulating Bora on his new role.

- Mark