Wendell Cochran

Senior Editor
Phone: (202) 885-2075
cochran@american.edu

Wendell Cochran is the founding senior editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He joined the American University School of Communication in 1992. Cochran has spent more than 40 years practicing and teaching journalism. Along the way he has covered everything from local government to Congress to presidential campaigns. He has bylines from nearly 40 of the 50 states. He worked as a business reporter, special projects editor, and project director for leading news organizations including the Kansas City Star, Des Moines Register and Gannett News Service. He has also worked as a contributing editor to Top Producer, a leading agriculture magazine.

He spent most of his career as a business reporter and editor, specializing in topics such as agricultural policy, international trade, and banking and finance. His stories have won or shared four national reporting awards, including the Amos Tuck Award for Economic Understanding, the John Hancock Award for Business Reporting (twice) and the National Headliners Award. He is a former member of the board of directors of Investigative Reporters Editors Inc.

Incubating new economic models for journalism.

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Workshop Partners

We publish online and in print, often teaming up with other news organizations. We post quarterly updates to our BankTracker project, in which you can view the financial health of every bank and credit union in the country, with msnbc.com, and we co-publish stories in our What Went Wrong project with The Philadelphia Inquirer and New America Media. Learn more on our partners page.

America What Went Wrong

Donald Barlett and James Steele are revisiting America: What Went Wrong, their landmark 1991 newspaper series, in a new project with the Investigative Reporting Workshop. Over the next year, the project team will examine how four decades of public policy has shaped America's ongoing economic crisis.