Lam Thuy Vo is a journalist who marries data analysis with on-the-ground reporting to examine how systems and policies affect individuals. She is currently an investigative reporter working with Documented, an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities, and an associate professor of data journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she was a journalist at The Markup, BuzzFeed News, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America and NPR’s Planet Money.
She has told stories at the intersection of economics, technology and society for more than a decade and has documented how power imbalances, when baked into systems, adversely impact those who are already living on the margins. She has documented how excessive ‘quality-of-life’ complaints led to the over-policing of minorities, how they contributed to the raids of Black-owned businesses and how Ring’s social platform funneled suspicions from residents in Whiter and wealthier areas of Los Angeles directly to police. She has looked into how changes in immigration enforcement drove immigrants into the arms of fraudulent lawyers. And she has looked into the powerful role that technology has played in the surveillance of teens, the policing of protesters, and the perpetuation of anti-Muslim hate by Myanmar politicians.
Her work as a reporter and the work she’s shepherded as an editor and professor has won or been nominated more than 40 awards. Among the organizations that have recognized her work are the Overseas Press Club, the Online News Association, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and the Poynter Institute. She has done longform work as a Brown University Information Futures Lab Fellow, an Open Society Soros Justice Fellow, an AI Accountability Fellow for the Pulitzer Center, and as an Type Investigations Ida B. Wells Fellow.
She has also worked as an educator, scholar and public speaker for a decade, developing newsroom-wide training programs for institutions like Al Jazeera America and The Wall Street Journal; workshops for journalists across the US as well as from Asia, Latin America and Europe, and semester-long courses for the Craig Newmark CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Most recently, she co-designed a curriculum on how to cover artificial intelligence that centers the needs of the global south for the Pulitzer Center.
She’s brought her research about misinformation and the impact of algorithms on our political views to institutions like Harvard, Georgetown, MIT, Columbia and Data and Society. In 2019, she published a book about her empirical approach to finding stories in data from the Internet for No Starch Press.
She is also committed to helping her industry become more diverse. She co-administers a slack community for journalists of color and co-created a resource guide for journalists of color looking for career growth, salary data, demographics breakdowns of newsrooms and training opportunities.\ A German-born Vietnamese immigrant, she made her way to New York City via London, Berlin, Hong Kong and Oakland and has adopted continuous learning as a way of life. She taught herself how to code by making data visualizations about breakups; she learned how to use a hammer drill to build inclusive rock climbing routes on the sides of the Rocky Mountains; and she will always mosey her way into the kitchens of ‘aunties’ and ‘uncles’ who are willing to show her how to make their favorite home-cooked meals.