Today is my last day at The Vancouver Sun

Today is my last day at The Vancouver Sun.

Along with several of my Sun colleagues, I have taken a buyout offer. It was not an easy decision.

I’ve been at The Sun almost my entire working life: I joined the paper in 1998, at the age of 22. And of the 17 years I’ve worked here, the past few have easily been the happiest and most fulfilling of my entire career.

I always loved being a reporter, and by the mid 2000s I’d carved out a little niche for myself as The Sun’s “FOI nerd”: my desk piled high with government documents I’d obtained through hundreds of Freedom of Information requests.

Then, in 2008, Sun editor Val Casselton brought David McKie and Rob Cribb to Vancouver for a two-day training session in what was then called “computer assisted reporting”. I went into the session curious, but a bit skeptical. I came out brimming with ideas and with a new career goal: I wanted to be a data journalist.

Ever since, my bosses at The Sun — most notably Harold Munro and Adrienne Tanner — have been nothing but supportive. They’ve given me the time I needed to learn new skills and the freedom to experiment with new forms of storytelling, from interactive charts to Twitter robots.

I’ve had the opportunity to pursue both my own data stories and to team up with talented beat reporters (like Tracy Sherlock, Larry Pynn and Doug Todd) to weave data into The Sun’s coverage of everything from pollution to education.

So why I am I leaving?

Mainly to pursue my other great passion: teaching. Both at Kwantlen, where I’ve been a part-time faculty member for the past decade, and through my own data visualization training workshops. I’ll also be looking for other opportunities to put my data and storytelling skills to use.

For those of you who have enjoyed The Sun’s data journalism over the years, thank you for your interest.

And don’t worry: There’s plenty more to come!

Tara Carman has recently done some fantastic data work for the paper, particularly on vaccination rates. And I’ve been doing data training all summer for Tara and some of The Sun’s other newsroom nerds: Lori Culbert, Tracy Sherlock and Mark Yuen.

If you’d like to keep tabs on what I get up to next, you can check out my personal website (www.chadskelton.com) or follow me on Twitter (@chadskelton). My personal email address is cskeltondata@gmail.com.