June 6, 2025 (press release) –
I’m pleased to welcome James O’Toole to the A.I. Initiatives team as a senior machine-learning engineer.
James is a journalist turned engineer turned both. He most recently served as a senior newsroom engineer at The Washington Post, where he led several artificial-intelligence projects, including Haystacker, a tool for making sense of large datasets with A.I. James is reuniting with Dylan Freedman, who was his teammate at The Post before joining our team last year. Dylan reports that James was known for his “reporting prowess, inventive engineering exploits and blazing-fast mile time.”
After graduating from Princeton, James began his career as a reporter at the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia. When he returned to the United States, he reported for CNNMoney, where his editor was Rich Barbieri, who describes James as “a great mind and a gem of a person.” James moved from those jobs into engineering, working for Artsy, the City of Pittsburgh and Media Cloud on data pipelines and other tools. He remained attracted to journalism, though, and went to The Post in 2021.
His first day was June 2. As previously announced, Teresa Mondría Terol is also joining as our first A.I. fellow, part of the 2025–26 Times Fellowship class. She also started on June 2 from New York. With the new team members, we aim to cover a wider range of A.I. applications in the newsroom and for readers.
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