Americans more concerned about made-up news than climate change

False news stories outweigh melting ice caps, rising seas and soaring temperatures on many Americans’ list of threats facing the country, according to a report published today by the Pew Research Center. More Americans call “made-up news and information” a “very big problem” for the country than identify issues such as climate change, racism and …

Candidates take their messages to the West

Fourteen Democratic presidential hopefuls are meeting in San Francisco this weekend for the California Democratic Party’s annual convention, underscoring the state’s potential importance in the presidential primary calendar and highlighting key issues already dominating the campaign trail. In 2020, California’s primary is slated for March 3, also known as Super Tuesday. It joins 13 other …

IRW celebrates 10

The Investigative Reporting Workshop celebrated 10 years of publishing with a reception and short program on April 18, 2019. Former Washington Post Executive Editor Len Downie and author and former Vanity Fair and Time contributor James Steele, both on IRW’s Advisory Board, and Kimbriell Kelly of The Washington Post joined Workshop editors and students to talk about …

Students contribute to Washington Post series

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 Hanssen, Kristian Hernandez, Erin Logan, Samuel Northrop and Liz Weber. Orion-Smith, Griffith, Logan …

Mitchell says time may be running out for civil-rights cases

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 …

Summer internships

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 …

Watching, listening: All part of the journalistic process

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. …

Both sides use immigration as election tactic

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 …

Better together: Journalists and academics brainstorm ways to collaborate for more impact

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 …