Sandeep Junnarkar began his career by helping to build the earliest digital editions of The New York Times as a breaking news editor, reporter, and web producer. For The Times, he wrote articles that explored the intersection of technology and how it was reshaping major fields like medicine, psychiatry, and communications.
Junnarkar is also a consulting newsroom trainer at Bloomberg where he is focused on creating curriculum around data journalism. He’s also advising Bloomberg journalists on their data news projects.
In March 2019, Junnarkar received a competitive grant from Knight Foundation’s Ethics and Governance in AI Initiative, a joint project of the MIT Media Lab and Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His project was one of seven chosen from more than 500 entries, and will train community journalists to analyze how artificial intelligence and algorithms are impacting immigrants and low-income communities in New York City and around the United States.
In 2017, he and his colleague Jere Hester received a grant from the NYC Media Lab to work on an augmented reality project called YOU ARE HERE – an immersive smartphone-based experience that uses AR to tell NYC stories, melding past and present from a street-level view. More recently, he conceived of and spearheaded The Hate Index, a website that compiles incidents of intolerance since the 2016 presidential elections. Visitors can filter the hate incidents by who, where, and how the hate occurred.
He is also busy with a team building a groundbreaking tool called PathChartr, which would allow news and community organizations without coders to deliver personalized, relevant, and helpful information to users who are guided through interactive journeys, fueled by their answers to a series of questions.
In the past, Junnarkar received numerous journalism awards, including an Online Journalism Award for his investigative series on hackers’ frequent intrusions into banking systems and how that presaged the vulnerability of all our personal information online.
He received a B.A. in Social Science from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.