Robert Mackey writes about national and international news through the prism of social media. Before joining The Intercept as a Senior Writer, he was a reporter and columnist for the New York Times, where he anchored the newspaper’s breaking news blog, The Lede, for five years, and wrote a news analysis column, Open Source, from 2014 to 2016. His work is focused on making sense of events through the close reading of firsthand accounts, photographs, and video posted on social networks by witnesses and participants.

His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Slate, and The Guardian.

As a television producer, he has looked at the role played by soccer hooligans in the war between Serbia and Croatia for Britain’s Channel 4, and spent a year and a half making a series of video letters from refugees for a United Nations-sponsored program broadcast in Sarajevo, Zagreb, and Belgrade during the wars in the former Yugoslavia.