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Graduate students from the School of Communication’s practicum at The Washington Post contributed to the Post’s “Murder with Impunity” series, which was named a 2019 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. They are Matt Bernardini, Orion Donovan-Smith, Kristen Griffith, Shelby Hansen, Kristian Hernandez, Erin Logan, Samuel Northrop and Liz Weber. Orion-Smith, Griffith, Logan …

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What are the next 10 years of civil-rights remedies going to be like? Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning civil-rights and investigative reporter for the Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi, was asked how much time is really left to bring people to justice for killings during the 1950s and 1960s. “If you’re talking about criminal prosecutions,” he said in …

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Summer internship applications are closed for 2019. Please check back for other opportunities. The Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit news organization based at the American University School of Communication in Washington, D.C., is looking for smart, engaged college students and recent graduates from around the country for internships in the summer of 2019. Positions include …

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Master’s student Courtney Rozen looked into efforts by U.S. travel agencies and major cities to attract Chinese tourists for her semester-long assignment in an international-investigative class with Charles Lewis, IRW’s executive editor and a full professor at American University. Over the course of three months, she ended up focusing on the District of Columbia, where …

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A student recently told me how much she learned by watching and listening to a reporter she was working with over several months. She said the reporter was patient and understanding during interviews. The reporter’s manner was a revelation, the student said, because these were characteristics others had warned her were not assets in journalism. …

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Candidates from both parties in the upcoming midterm elections are using immigration to fire up their bases or paint negative images of their opponents. This is a marked change from the last midterm elections in 2014 when immigration wasn’t considered a top issue for the GOP. Some Democrats have pushed to abolish U.S. Immigration and …

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Coming of age as a young journalist is challenging during any time period, but it feels especially fraught in 2018. Some of the profession’s most respected names, from New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet to Washington Post Editor Marty Baron, have lamented the lack of trust in the mainstream news media and the “out …

Continue reading “What Woodward’s reporting style can teach young journalists”

Reporters and researchers can collaborate more extensively to shed light on issues the country’s workforce is facing, panelists said Friday at the Mind to Mind symposium. Journalists typically call academics to get quotes for their stories, and academics call journalists to ask them to write about their research papers, Christa Scharfenberg, CEO of Reveal from …

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The WAMU 88.5 series “Collateral Damage” focused on the impact of the D.C. police department’s aggressive focus on confiscating illegal guns. The investigation with the Investigative Reporting Workshop explored how tactics used by police to search for guns are also angering and alienating residents, especially in D.C.’s predominantly black neighborhoods where police focus these efforts. …

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When Chuck Lewis created the Investigative Reporting Workshop in 2008, we didn’t have anything dynamic to “show” our potential readers. We were in start-up mode, assigning those first few projects to the post-graduate fellows and reporters on contract with us, and working with a PBS FRONTLINE producer on a program in the beginning stages of …

Continue reading “Celebrating 10 years and a redesign”