Colonel William A. Phillips

The Investigative Reporting Workshop is a nonprofit, editorially independent newsroom based at American University in Washington, D.C. in that trains undergraduate, graduate student and early career journalists by pairing them with professional newsrooms on investigative, enterprise and data journalism projects. Since its founding, the IRW has partnered with dozens of professional newsrooms on hundreds of investigations, and trained more than 240 student journalists -- many of whom now work in leading newsrooms across the country.

Since 2013, IRW has had a partnership with The Washington Post in which graduate students work as researchers and reporters on major stories, including contributing to the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for public service for its coverage of the causes, costs and aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Other reporting partnerships have included collaborations with PBS FRONTLINE, NBC News, WAMU-FM, Reveal News, the New Yorker, ABC World News Tonight, Politico, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Public Health Watch, McClatchy newspapers, Mother Jones magazine, and the Columbia Journalism Review.

History

Founding

IRW was founded by professors Charles Lewis, a national investigative journalist for more than 30 years, and Wendell Cochran, a longtime business reporter and editor; the publishing of original content began in the spring of 2009. Lewis, a MacArthur Fellow and former producer for "60 Minutes,” founded four nonprofits in Washington, including the Center for Public Integrity, and has written six books, including “The Buying of the President 2004.” In 2018, Lewis won the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. Lewis retired as executive editor in 2022.

Editors and Staff

In July 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Wesley J. Lowery joined the Investigative Reporting Workshop as executive editor.

Other editors currently include:

Lynne Perri, former deputy managing editor for graphics and photography at USA TODAY and a former reporter and editor at The Tampa Tribune, is managing editor. Perri is a journalist-in-residence and senior lecturer in the School of Communication at American University. She teaches reporting, journalism ethics and visual journalism, and has led workshops for The Washington Post, the Knight Center for International Journalists, the American Press Institute, and the Society for News Design.

John Sullivan, a Pulitzer Prize winner while at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post, is a senior editor. He is also as associate editor for the Post's investigations team, and runs an investigative practicum at the graduate level inside the Post's newsroom. Sullivan was previously a senior lecturer and assistant director of Medill Watchdog and on the journalism faculty at Northwestern University, after working for nearly a decade at The Inquirer where his assignments included covering the war in Iraq, state government, city hall, science and health.

Aarushi Sahejpal is data editor at IRW, adjunct professor of data journalism at American University’s School of Communication, and a data reporter on The Accountability Project at The Center for Public Integrity. Sahejpal is an alum of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Biden-Harris Administration, The COVID Tracking Project, and a former intern at IRW.

Background

The model for the Workshop is the Children's Television Workshop, which originally was created to produce “Sesame Street,” but became an incubator and innovator for much of educational television.

Recent Work

For the last two years IRW’s coverage has examined toxic air and water — or lack of access to water — and other environmental and health issues nationwide generally, and in Texas in particular, with the nonprofit Public Health Watch. Other stories have focused on immigration policy changes and sexual assaults in Virginia schools. IRW has continued coverage of fatal shootings by police with The Washington Post, as well as contributing to a series of stories about the NFL blocking the rise of Black coaches. While topics vary widely, IRW focuses on accountability.

Notable Work

The Accountability Project

When The Investigative Reporting Workshop launched The Accountability Project in 2019, the goal was to provide one place for researchers and journalists to search across a wide catalog of previously siloed public data at once. Our collections include a wide variety of data on money in politics, nonprofit organizations, government spending and several other topics – all accessible from a single search. In 2022, IRW transitioned leadership of the project to the Center for Public Integrity, but IRW staff and interns continue to work on TAP.

Banktracker

Each quarter the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. requires every bank in the nation to submit detailed reports about its financial condition. This data is public. The Investigative Reporting Workshop downloads the data files from the FDIC website to extract several key variables of bank performance.

Investigating Power

The online, multimedia project, Investigating Power showcases more than 50 hours of interviews with distinguished journalists. This project documents “moments of truth” in contemporary U.S. history and the careers of notable journalists since the 1950s. It is a part of a larger project and book, “The Future of Truth,” by Charles Lewis, the former "60 Minutes" producer.

In January 2018, Investigating Power was reworked with a new look and additional content. The update added educator resources for both the middle and high school level and the undergraduate/post-secondary level.

Documentaries

FRONTLINE documentaries

The Workshop had a partnership with the PBS program Frontline. Productions include "Flying Cheap" a documentary about the impact of the major carriers’ reliance on regional airlines and their pilots, which won a Screen Actors Guild Award for writing; a follow-up, “Flying Cheaper,” a follow-up about the impact of outsourcing maintenance on planes; and “Lost in Detention,” a documentary that chronicled the administration’s enforcement policy, which has deported 400,000 people annually the last two years and put thousands in detention centers with legal representation, often splitting up families in which the children are U.S. citizens. In 2012 and 2013, the Workshop also co-produced "Big Sky, Big Money," which chronicles campaign finance in Montana; "The Digital Campaign," about the 2012 presidential race; and "Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria," a look at the pervasive problem of drug resistant infestions in hospitals.

In 2017, The Workshop collaborated with Frontline to produce "Poverty, Politics, and Profit: The Housing Crisis."

In 2018, The Workshop co-produced "Blackout in Puerto Rico," with PBS Frontline and NPR. It aired on PBS stations across the country and online.

National Awards

Charles Lewis, executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, talks about winning the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.

I.F. Stone Award

The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University honored Lewis, IRW's founding executive editor, with the 2018 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence. The award honors investigative reporter I.F. Stone and goes out annually to a journalist whose work captures the spirit of journalistic independence, integrity and courage that characterized I.F. Stone’s Weekly.

Pulitzer Prize

John Sullivan leads a significant long-term partnership with The Washington Post resulting in ongoing, hands-on opportunities for IRW students that has helped drive complex, high-impact investigations such as The Attack (the centerpiece of the Post's 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning public service coverage), Murder with Impunity (a Pulitzer finalist), and Fatal Force (a log of every fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer in the U.S. since 2015). Intensive, hands-on efforts of IRW and practicum students allow substantive data research that answers questions on inequity and abuse of power in America.

The Emmy Awards

“The Healthcare Divide,” the most recent of many collaborations over the years among veteran FRONTLINE writer-producer Rick Young and his team, NPR and the Investigative Reporting Workshop, has been nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Business, Consumer or Economic coverage. The program, which aired in 2021, looked at disparities in American health care and the large urban hospitals hit hard by the pandemic. Reporters traveled across the country over four months to examine the market forces and uneven government support that were deepening the problems. They found widening resources between rich hospitals and those that serve the poor.

Frank Morton Award from the Overseas Press Club

“Trump’s Trade War,” a FRONTLINE-NPR collaboration in association with IRW, is the 2020 winner of the Morton Frank Award from the Overseas Press Club for best international business news reporting in TV, video, radio, audio or podcast. Young also won a Writers Guild Award, announced in February, for the same program.

Murrow Award

“Collateral Damage” won a regional Edward R. Murrow award in 2019 from the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) in the Investigative Reporting Category for Large Market Radio Stations.

The story, produced in partnership with WAMU-88.5, revealed that few police departments are better at finding illegal guns than D.C.’s. But residents in some majority-African American neighborhoods say that trying to get those guns off the street has led to overly aggressive police tactics, including being unfairly targeted for stop-and-frisks.

IRW worked with reporter Patrick Madden and a team at the NPR affiliate to produce on-air and online stories.

Funding

As a nonprofit newsroom and training ground for future journalists, the Investigative Reporting Workshop is funded primarily by grants from private foundations and donations from individuals. The Workshop will accept corporate matches to their employees’ charitable contributions. IRW is a tax-exempt organization; donations to the organization are tax-deductible.