New Faces at The Intercept: Farai Chideya and Roger Hodge

The Intercept is thrilled to welcome two new members to its editorial team: Farai Chideya and Roger Hodge.

Chideya, joining us as a Columnist and Consulting Editor, will explore in her columns the ways technology shapes our lives — as each individual is shadowed by what Chideya calls a “cloud self” that increasingly defines our existence at home, work and in social and political arenas. Her debut piece today focuses on the experiences of people whose online identities were exposed in the sorts of data breaches that have recently spread across the United States and the world.

A former reporter and program host for ABC News, CNN and NPR, Chideya, who has sought throughout her career to “bring the human experience alive in media,” is the author of the forthcoming book The Episodic Career: The Future of Work in America. A revised edition of her 1995 book on race and media, Don’t Believe the Hype, is also forthcoming. She was a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics in 2012, and is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

In addition to writing for the site, Chideya will draw on her extensive radio experience to develop The Intercept’s podcast programming.

We are also delighted to announce that Roger D. Hodge will be our new National Editor. Hodge will oversee major investigations as well as editing features and news articles on a range of subjects, with special attention to the manipulation of the democratic process by moneyed elites. “The underlying theme that unites most of The Intercept’s journalism is the abuse of power and the corruption of our democratic institutions,” Hodge said. “This corruption has the effect of reducing democratic citizens into helpless subjects of the state, and this has been one of the central themes of my work as an editor and as a writer.”

Hodge has been editor of the Oxford American since September 2012. Prior to that, he was the editor of Harper’s Magazine, where he began as a fact-checker in 1996. The cover story of Hodge’s final issue at Harper’s, “The Guantánamo Suicides,” by Scott Horton, received the 2011 National Magazine Award for Reporting. Hodge is the author of The Mendacity of Hope: Presidential Power, Corporate Money, and the Politics of Corrupt Influence, and his essays have appeared in magazines such as Popular Science, the London Review of Books, and Texas Monthly.

In addition, we are restructuring and expanding our Washington office. Dan Froomkin, who has been covering Washington for The Intercept as a Senior Writer, will now lead our D.C. coverage as Washington Editor, overseeing our investigative blog, Unofficial Sources, which will soon be adding new contributors.

A month ago, we welcomed Charlotte Greensit, a former senior editor of Time magazine, as Managing Editor at our New York headquarters. Peter Maass will continue to write commentary and features while developing, as Senior Editor, our new coverage of books and films. In the coming weeks and months we’ll expand further, enabling us to deepen our investigative coverage of national security and criminal justice while branching out into new terrain.