Building tools for storytellers, from TimelineJS to AI agents. Professor at Northwestern and faculty lead of Knight Lab.
Open to senior roles leading design, product and engineering for creative and AI tools, plus advising and talks.
Get in touchZach Wise is a Pulitzer, Peabody and Emmy-winning designer and developer, and a Professor at Northwestern University.
As faculty lead of Knight Lab, he has led the design and development of TimelineJS, StoryMapJS and other open-source tools used by hundreds of thousands of storytellers in newsrooms and classrooms around the world.
He created Knight Lab Studio and has run it for 12 years, leading teams of journalism, computer science and design students. Since 2023 that work has centered on generative AI research, from auditing bias in image models to building autonomous news agents. He also teaches AI across most of his Medill courses.
Before Northwestern, Wise was Senior Multimedia Producer for the Las Vegas Sun, where his video and interactive on Construction Deaths on the Strip contributed to the paper's first Pulitzer Prize.
In 2008, he joined The New York Times' multimedia team, where his work earned a Peabody and an Emmy. He helped launch the Times' Lens photography blog and shot short documentaries for The New York Times Magazine.
His work began at Ohio University, where as a visiting professor in the School of Visual Communication he founded Soul of Athens. A native of Athens, Ohio, he holds a master's degree in photojournalism from Ohio University.
Since 2023, I've led Knight Lab Studio teams in prototyping how newsrooms can use generative AI, and how to hold it accountable.
As people get more of their news through AI assistants, the story itself is no longer the only product. The part that matters is the verified reporting underneath it. Bedrock asks what a reporter should hand to the machines, and packages that human ground truth so AI agents can build on it without making things up.
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How a story lands in different communities is central to trust, but most newsrooms can't afford focus groups. Mirror lets a journalist interview AI digital twins of real audience segments about a draft before it runs, and asks how to make those twins authentic, stable and honest about what they are.
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Starting in 2023, well before AI-generated video flooded every feed, Studio teams set out to prove that AI hosts could write, voice and publish their own short news videos. Over three terms they went from a local model reading articles aloud to autonomous agents with distinct personalities. The outputs were rough, sometimes cringeworthy, and that was part of the lesson: the project showed what was coming, and where the real value ends and the uncanny valley begins.
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Plenty of news stories have no image to go with them, and AI image generators look like an easy fix until you see who they picture as a construction worker or a social worker. This multi-year Studio project built an article-to-illustration pipeline, ran into the bias built into the models, and ended up building a tool to measure it.
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Chicago's budget is $882 million short. I built a 3D game about it with an AI coding agent in 29 minutes. The code wasn't the hard part.
Read MoreSceneVR is an engaging way to tell stories from an entirely new perspective. It turns your collection of panoramic and VR-ready photos into a slideshow of navigable scenes, allowing you to create unique 360° narratives.
Two cities on the Persian Gulf, Doha and Abu Dhabi are the settings for vast construction projects, including major new museums designed by some of the world's most celebrated architects.
Tony-nominated actors perform scenes from their shows out of costume but in character.
In the shadows of the cranes, steel, and concrete upon which Las Vegas has pinned its addiction to growth, a body count has emerged.
Earth, covered by stacks of thousands of virtual photographs, corresponding in location to where they were taken by Lens readers at one “Moment in Time” (15:00 U.T.C., Sunday, May 2).
Landing page for This American Life in conjunction with Google's doodle for Valentine's Day.
Southern Nevada water managers say they can no longer rely on the river so heavily, and must construct a massive pipeline to draw water stored underground for centuries in rural Nevada to Las Vegas.
Physical pieces I've designed and built: a living light sign at the entrance to Northwestern's Knight Lab, a projection-mapped wall of cubes that introduces visitors to the lab, and a workstation built as an object as much as a machine, which hosts local AI models.
Lens is the photojournalism blog of The New York Times, presenting the finest and most interesting visual and multimedia reporting — photographs, videos and slide shows. A showcase for Times photographers, it also seeks to highlight the best work of other newspapers, magazines and news and picture agencies; in print, in books, in galleries, in museums and on the Web.
With local journalism in crisis, Northwestern University has assembled a team of experts in digital innovation, audience understanding and business strategy. The goal: reinvent the relationship between news organizations and audiences to elevate enterprises that empower citizens.
Clay Reid and colleagues are going deep into the mouse brain to decipher the conversations and decisions of neurons.
An animated explanation of how banks use securities lending to make a profit, while their customers cover the losses.
Deanna Barch and her colleagues are trying to map connections in the human brain. The study is part of the...
Bounce is a raunchy, local hip-hop style that developed in the 1990s but is only now escaping its hometown with...
Willie Chapman has 10 children in 3 states and he’s 40 years old. Professional boxing matches are still his main...
This series examines the impact of Mexican drug cartels on both sides of the border.
LAS VEGAS — This city has seen more political commercials than anywhere else in 2012, more than anywhere else in...
Michael Dickinson has spent his career studying how flies fly and researchers in his lab have invented new devices to...
The singer-guitarist performs the title track from his new album.
Reporter Corey Kilgannon, Marcus Yam and myself chased calls over a police scanner for around 16hrs straight. What we found...
2007’s festival featured approx. 47,000 people from Las Vegas, the U.S. and the world, who all traveled to an ancient...
Experience the frenzy and interconnectivity of backstage at the first show at Lincoln Center during New York Fashion Week.