Rick Young has been working with PBS FRONTLINE since the early ’90s, reporting on a wide array of subjects — from the environment to politics to business — for more than 30 documentaries.
In 2009, Young launched a production partnership between FRONTLINE and the Investigative Reporting Workshop. The venture’s first co-production, Flying Cheap, was an investigation of the regional airline industry. Young received a 2011 Writers Guild Award for this documentary. Since then, Young’s production team and IRW have co-produced more than a dozen programs for PBS, including, most recently, “The Business of Disaster,” “Politics, Poverty and Profits,” and “Blackout in Puerto Rico.”
Before working with IRW, Young collaborated with veteran FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith on a series of documentaries examining America’s changing economic landscape. Their reports include Can You Afford to Retire?, Is Wal-Mart Good for America? , Tax Me If You Can and The Wall Street Fix .
Young was producer and correspondent of Gunrunners, a documentary about the illegal small arms trade in West Africa that premiered the PBS series FRONTLINE/World in 2002. Prior to that, he worked as a producer on FRONTLINE programs with the Kirk Documentary Group and with the Center for Investigative Reporting.
He was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 2007-08 and his work has garnered numerous awards, including two Emmys, Writer’s Guild nominations and the Sigma Delta Chi award. Before turning to journalism, Young spent six years as an investigator for the U.S. House of Representatives.
Stories written by Rick Young
- PBS program on drug-resistant bacteria (Oct. 21, 2013)
- Big Sky, Big Money (Oct. 30, 2012)
- Documents found in meth house bare inner workings of ‘dark money’ (Oct. 29, 2012)
- Romania, Vermont, Arizona: Guns follow complex route to Mexican cartels (Feb. 3, 2011)
