The Intercept is welcoming several exciting journalists to our team.

Shaun King will be joining us as a columnist. Most recently, King was the writer-in-residence at Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project and, before that, a senior justice writer at the New York Daily News.

With his trademark blend of reporting, commentary, and online activism, King has charted the progress — and the challenges — of today’s movement for racial justice and against police brutality and mass incarceration. He first gained national recognition for his impassioned coverage of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, at the hands of police. He went on to write for the liberal blog Daily Kos as a contributor before moving to the Daily News, where he penned more than 600 columns.

Throughout his career, King has built a formidable social media following. As a journalist, King has deployed this following as a tool of the craft; King’s audience provides tips to stories of injustice that would otherwise be ignored, as well as to all-too-rare triumphs of activism across the country. (Most recently, he took to Twitter to crowdsource the identities of those responsible for the brutal beating of DeAndre Harris in Charlottesville, Virginia.) Today, with Donald Trump in the White House and a white supremacist tailwind at his back, King’s brave, creative, and inspiring work has become even more vital — and we are proud to give it a home at The Intercept.

“It’s hard to know a moment in history when you are in it, but this much I know: We are in a painful and peculiar point in American history. So much is wrong that it’s hard to keep up, but we must,” King said. “At my heart, I’m a confrontational journalist. At most outlets, that means I’m a square peg in a round hole, but not at The Intercept. Adversarial journalism isn’t the peculiar exception here – it’s the norm. That’s why I’m joining the team.”