Meet our newest journalists: Sandra Santos, Julie Chang and Rob Reid

We’re pleased to announce the three newest journalists to join The Texas Tribune.

Sandra Santos is our new afternoon/evening editor. She joins us from San Antonio, where she has worked since 2006 — first as assistant city editor/night metro editor for the Express-News and then as audience editor for the nonprofit San Antonio Report. Her experience as a night news editor and an audience editor makes her perfect for her new job here, where she’ll be assigning and editing breaking news and late-coming enterprise and ushering our daily newsletters, The Brief and The Blast, through the production process. Prior to her time in San Antonio, Sandra worked for the Houston Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman and the Beaumont Enterprise. In her cover letter, she told us she’s “something of a breaking-news nerd with a heavy interest in politics and the law, and a notorious night owl.” Sandra started on Aug. 26 and is based in San Antonio.

Julie Chang is our new health and human services editor. During her eight years at the Austin American-Statesman, she served as a state public education and social services reporter, an investigative reporter and as a fill-in editor. Her work at the Statesman was nominated for a Goldsmith Prize and won Texas Managing Editors, Headliners Foundation and Edward R. Murrow awards. Julie impressed us with her deep knowledge of state government and the health care system and a detailed vision for the health team. Most recently, she worked as managing editor of County magazine, the quarterly publication of the Texas Association of Counties, while completing her master’s degree in public affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. In her cover letter, Julie promised “to coach my reporters to use their humanity to connect with struggling Texans and to leverage my data analysis skills honed through years of graduate school training to root out trends often hidden in numbers.” Julie starts on Sept. 10, based in Austin.

Rob Reid joined our data visuals team this month as our first-ever education data developer. He will be working on building and maintaining data products that will help push our education coverage in new and exciting ways. Rob was a database administrator for two decades at Healthy Families America, a program of Prevent Child Abuse America, which supports a national network of sites providing home visiting services to families through early childhood. There he led the development of a national data warehouse that helped inform efforts to improve the quality of Healthy Families sites. He also developed a case tracking system used at 65 sites nationwide.

In recent years, Rob has grown a strong passion for journalism and freelanced for several news outlets in Chicago. His stories include an investigation into 911 call-takers being overwhelmed and dealing with mental health issues, and a data story on fines for unshoveled sidewalks being disproportionately levied on people who live on the South Side of Chicago. He’s also finishing up a data internship at The Tributary, a nonprofit newsroom in Jacksonville, Florida, where he is developing a news application that will show voting patterns among Florida legislators. At the Tribune, Rob will use his experience to make our education coverage more data-focused. He will also maintain our public schools explorer and help us as we decide its future. He’ll be moving from Chicago to Austin.

Around 50 journalists work at The Texas Tribune, based in 10 cities across Texas as well as Washington, D.C., and working across disciplines from reporting and photography to data visualization and audience engagement. We’re excited by these latest additions to the newsroom.