Anthony DeBarros

I was born into a Portuguese-Italian family just north of New York City. Early on, I found a love for books, music, and writing and, after I bought my first computer, I found out that I really liked working with hardware and software too. I've been fortunate to combine many of those interests in my work as a data journalist.

For more than two decades, I’ve combed through spreadsheets, built databases, scraped websites, and sorted numbers to find news in data. For the past 7.5 years (yup, I do count things), I’ve worked at The Wall Street Journal, where I collaborate with reporters covering elections, money in politics, the economy, and demographics.

My book, Practical SQL: A Beginner’s Guide to Storytelling with Data, teaches the popular database programming language SQL along with data analysis techniques I’ve learned—sometimes the hard way. Thanks to my publisher, No Starch Press, we’re on a second edition with translations in Korean, traditional Chinese, and Polish.

I’ve been a team leader, product manager, and data journalist for USA Today, Questex, the Poughkeepsie Journal, and DocumentCloud. I also flipped burgers at McDonald's and did a stint as a DJ on a rock music station.

One of my projects won a Silver Baton from the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards—I helped reporters build a database to power a website about forgotten lead smelters in America. The site is unfortunately no longer online, but you can see pieces of it in the Internet Archive. Here's a list of other honors.

Want to get in touch? Please see the Get Help page on my book website. I'm always glad to help if I can.

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