Malachy Browne

Malachy Browne co-founded the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times, where he runs and reports projects as its enterprise director.

Founded in 2017, Visual Investigations is a pioneering form of journalism that combines traditional reporting with the analysis of visual evidence to find truth, hold the powerful to account and deconstruct important news events. The reporting often involves digital sleuthing, collecting and analyzing troves of video and audio, satellite images and other data, and creating 3-D reconstructions of crime scenes.

In 2023, Mr. Browne reported on the leaking of sensitive Pentagon documents to social media platforms popular with computer gamers. He was part of a team that received a Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for coverage of the Ukraine war, including an investigative film he produced that named the Russian unit and commander responsible for killing dozens of civilians in Bucha. He was also on the team awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for exposing Russian culpability in crimes around the world, including the bombing of hospitals in Syria.

Mr. Brown co-directed “Day of Rage,” a documentary capturing in vivid detail what happened during the U.S. Capitol riot. He has led investigations into the killing of Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans by police, the Las Vegas mass shooting, chemical weapons attacks in Syria, extra-judicial military shootings in Nigeria, the Saudi officials who killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and the killing of a young Palestinian medic along the Gaza-Israel border.
This teamwork has been cited in murder trials, congressional hearings and U.N. Security Council meetings. It has triggered policing reforms and several government inquiries.

Prior to joining The Times in 2016, Mr. Browne worked as a reporter and editor at Storyful and Reported.ly, two social journalism startups; at Village, a current affairs magazine in Ireland; and as a computer programmer. He earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering at University College Dublin and his master’s in international relations at the University of Limerick. He grew up in Broadford, County Limerick, in Ireland.