Weiyi 'Dawn' Cai

Bringing the News to Life

As a visual journalist at The New York Times, Weiyi 'Dawn' Cai, BA ’15, is helping readers see the bigger picture.

Weiyi 'Dawn' Cai, BA ’15, never wanted to be a journalist. Growing up in Hangzhou, China, not far from Shanghai, both of her parents had worked in the industry — her father as a television reporter and editor, her mother in radio. Like many young people, she felt some resistance about going into the family profession. Instead, she wanted to study the music industry when she came to Saint Joseph’s University.

But in her first year on campus, drawn by a scholarship and the University’s emphasis on community service, she found herself searching for opportunities to indulge her curiosity about graphic design and ended up joining The Hawk, the school’s student newspaper, as layout editor. More than a decade later, she’s never looked back. Now based in Seoul after a series of international moves, she is a senior editor for visuals at The New York Times, leading a three-person team of journalists working on data-driven, visually oriented stories focusing on Asia. 

“St. Joe’s played an instrumental role in getting me to where I am right now,” says Cai, whose experience has carried her to some of journalism’s most prestigious publications, including The Washington Post and Reuters. “I would never have thought about being a journalist if it were not for The Hawk.”

Cai reflects on a biweekly series at The Hawk that focused on international affairs as a turning point in her career. To help illustrate reports on the Ebola virus or protests in Hong Kong or Syria, she began making infographics, timelines and other visual representations of the news. At the time, she was just dipping her toe into the pool of information design. Now, she’s swimming in the deep end.

At the Times, her visual work has helped readers understand changing immigrant voting patterns, investigated the causes of a deadly Bronx apartment fire, and mapped the spread of the coronavirus from China. These are among the most important stories of the day, all brought to life with Cai’s skillful assortment of digital tools.

“Visual storytelling isn’t about simply serving the text,” says Jenny Spinner, PhD, professor of English and director of the Writing Center at St. Joe’s, who was faculty adviser for The Hawk during Cai’s time there. “Effective visual storytelling is the text. Our business needs journalists like Dawn who are able to engage media consumers visually, to tell stories in non-alphabetic ways.”

Although she didn’t take any journalism classes, Cai’s courses at St. Joe’s helped shape her journalistic approach. She double-majored in communication studies and art history, inspired by a class on Impressionism that contributed to the expansive range of visual language that she pulls from for her work. A pottery class, meanwhile, helped her build a foundation of tangible design that encourages her to find creative storytelling solutions, like a corn maze made out of candy corn that graced the cover of the Post’s weekend section. 

“Being exposed to art and a bigger range of mediums was helpful to what I'm doing now,” Cai says. “I know not to limit myself to just one form or one way of visualizing things.”

Anjali Singhvi, senior staff editor for spatial investigations at the New York Times, who worked with Cai on the Bronx fire story, says the ability to “quickly iterate” and “present complex information in simple yet nontraditional ways” sets Cai apart.

“We often work with various kinds of data and formats, and bringing all these different visual elements together seamlessly is not an easy task,” Singhvi says, “but this is something that’s very evident in Dawn’s body of work.”

Cai was able to hit the ground running after college, thanks in part to an internship at The Florentine, an English-language news magazine in Florence, Italy, where she worked while studying abroad during her junior year. While working on a story about Tuscany’s Unesco World Heritage sites, she got her first taste of motion graphics, turning her illustrations of the region’s landmarks into a video that helped teach her to stay open to new ideas.

But it was during an internship at the Post the summer after she graduated that Cai learned a lesson that has guided her approach to journalism and life. One of the journalists she met with told her there was one word she shouldn’t say that summer: No. She internalized the suggestion and has carried it forward as a reminder to stay open to new challenges and new opportunities.

“Especially in journalism, being curious, being able to change direction last-minute and being able to jump on things at a moment’s notice are important,” Cai says.

That attitude was important in 2016, when she was unable to secure an H-1B visa to stay in the U.S. Rather than dwell on her disappointment, she put an optimistic spin on it, telling herself, “The whole world is opening up to me.” She ended up moving to Singapore to work as a data visualizations developer at Reuters for two years, an “amazing” experience that set her up for her work at the Times.

It all started, though, with long nights at The Hawk and an education that exposed Cai to a multidisciplinary approach to communication, she says.

“It made me realize I shouldn’t put myself into one box,” Cai says. “Visual communication is a broad subject with all kinds of possibilities.”

Connect with Weiyi 'Dawn' Cai.