Christiaan Triebert

Christiaan Triebert is a journalist on the Visual Investigations team, which combines traditional reporting with open-source methods.

Mr. Triebert’s work at The New York Times include a series exposing the Russian bombing of hospitals in Syria, the Pentagon’s flawed system of investigating allegations of civilian casualties, revealing how Iran shot down a civilian airliner and investigations into police brutality in the United States. He co-produced “Day of Rage,” one of the most complete pictures to date of what happened during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and why. These and other stories have shared two George Polk Awards, three Overseas Press Club of America Awards, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, a World Press Photo and two Pulitzer Prizes.

Visual Investigations is a new form of explanatory and accountability journalism being pioneered at The Times. It combines traditional reporting with more advanced digital forensics that may include collecting and analyzing cell phone videos, satellite pictures and other imagery, social media posts, and 3-D reconstructions of crime scenes.

Prior to joining The Times in 2019, Mr. Triebert worked as a senior investigator and lead trainer at the investigative group Bellingcat. Training journalists in finding, verifying, and analyzing publicly available digital information, he worked in a range of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and Latin America. In 2017, he won a European Press Prize Innovation Award for his reconstruction of the attempted military coup in Turkey using leaked WhatsApp messages and social media content.

Mr. Triebert started his journalism career as a freelance photojournalist, and reported from Ukraine and Iraq. Over the years, his work focused on international crime and conflict and appeared, amongst others, in Daily Beast, Foreign Policy, and the Al Jazeera Media Institute. He has also worked on verifying United States-led coalition airstrikes allegedly causing civilian harm in Iraq and Syria for the monitoring group Airwars.

Born in the Netherlands to a Javanese father and Frisian mother, he earned bachelor’s degrees in international relations and philosophy at the University of Groningen and his masters in conflict, security and development at King’s College London.