About the
Workshop

The Investigative Reporting Workshop aims to hold the powerful accountable through in-depth, data-driven investigations. IRW achieves this by pairing student and early-career journalists with experienced professionals on investigative, data and enterprise projects. Under the guidance of our editors, interns and fellows learn journalism by doing journalism. In exchange, our partners are able to produce ambitious journalism they would have been unable to accomplish otherwise.

Collaborations over the years have included The Washington Post, WAMU-FM, the Washington City Paper, the 51st, Reveal News, the New Yorker, ABC World News Tonight, Politico, the Philadelphia Inquirer, McClatchy newspapers, Mother Jones magazine and website, New America Media, E&E News, and NBC News, Science magazine, the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, Eye on Ohio, the Maine Monitor and Public Health Watch.

Newsrooms interested in partnering with the IRW should contact Lynne Perri, interim executive editor, at lperri@irworkshop.org.

As a nonprofit newsroom and training ground for future journalists, the Workshop is funded primarily by grants and gifts  from private foundations and donations from individuals. 

IRW does not seek nor accept contributions from labor unions, governments, political parties or advocacy organizations. We partner with for-profit entities, such as major media outlets, as well as nonprofit newsrooms, to advance journalism, media, democracy and freedom of speech. Workshop editors and staff may attend domestic and international conferences to speak on issues related to investigative journalism and the free press.   

Required narrative and financial reports are made to funders detailing the use of grants and gifts funds and, through stewardship newsletters and periodic updates, individual donors are informed about IRW activities.  

IRW maintains a strict separation between funding and editorial content, and funders are not involved in editorial decisions.

American University provides office space, and tech and HR support to IRW.

Foundation and organizational funding in the last two years includes:

• Evelyn Y. Davis Foundation
• Heising-Simons Foundation
• Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) NewsMatch
• Litowitz Family Foundation
• Park Foundation
• The Poynter Institute
• Scripps Howard Fund
• Spotlight DC
• Tarbell Family Foundation

And approximately 90 generous individual donors.

The Investigative Reporting Workshop is committed to sharing in-depth, investigative stories about government and corporate accountability on a variety of topics, including immigration, health care, and scientific research. We encourage the re-publication of our stories, graphics and other content. Here are the ground rules if you’re interested in republishing; the guidelines are different if IRW works with you as a reporting partner. 

• All stories must retain our byline and include our organization.
• This note should be appended at either the top or bottom of any story:
  • Online: This story was originally published by the Investigative Reporting Workshop, a nonprofit news organization based at American University.
  • Print: This story was originally published by the Investigative Reporting Workshop (https://investigativereportingworkshop.org), an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom based at the American University School of Communication.  

• If you’re re-publishing online, please link back to the original story on the Investigative Reporting Workshop’s site.
• Content re-published online should include all links from our original story.
• Do not edit our stories. Minor changes to reflect your publication’s style are allowed, as are changes that reflect the passage of time. For example, “last month” could be changed to “last year.”
• You cannot re-publish our material automatically or wholesale. Stories must instead be selected and republished individually.
• You cannot sell our material separately.
• Our content can be placed on pages with advertisements, but not advertisements specifically paired with or designed for our content.
• We like to see where our republished stories end up! Please notify us via e-mail to lperri@irworkshop.org that you have republished our content. If applicable, please include a link to the location of the republished content.
• If we send you a request to remove our content from your website, you agree to do so immediately.

In the past, some organizations have published an analysis of our work along with additional reporting by their own staffers. Others have had our reporters as guest contributors on their websites. If you’re interested in partnerships, contact Lynne Perri at lperri@irworkshop.org.

An archive of IRW work prior to 2023 is available at: https://archive.investigativereportingworkshop.org/

Highlights of 2024 and 2025 include contributing research and fact-checking on the "40 Acres and a Lie" series in collaboration among the Center for Investigative Reporting/Reveal, Mother Jones, the Center for Public Integrity, and IRW. The two-and-a-half-year investigation, a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer in the Explanatory Reporting Category, revealed that a government program gave—and then took away—land to more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people in the South immediately after the Civil War.

IRW also partnered with newsrooms in 2024 to produce:

• an in-depth analysis and follow-up stories of the Olympic medal count with The Washington Post 
• the child-care crisis and the state's stimulus spending for The Maine Monitor
• the creation of a more conservative appeals court in Texas, which could impact environmental health, with Public Health Watch
• lack of repairs in public housing with the Washington City Paper

In 2025, to date, we published an analysis and searchable database of where the $261 million that came to Maine through the American Rescue Plan Act ended up, with The Maine Monitor, and a story about the problems with a nationwide program that detects gunshots in real time to alert police, with the Washington City Paper, and are working on stories related to health concerns and use of force at the border.

We recently published A Tragedy in Utica, about the year after a police shot and killed a 13-year-old boy in 2024.

We published an in-depth look at the use of force by the Border Patrol under the direction of Gregory Bovino with the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), showing that agents in the El Centro Sector have reported using force on other people more than three times as many times as they have faced assaults — a ratio higher than anywhere else in the agency —according to federal data.

All materials contained in this site, including, but not limited to, audio, text, photographs, videos and informational graphics, (hereinafter “content”) are protected by U.S. copyright law and international copyright law.

The right to download and store or output the content on this site is granted, provided you keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices and all credits on the written and visual journalism.

The content may not be reproduced in any edited form, although other news organizations can summarize and link to stories.

The content may not be modified, distributed, retransmitted, or used, in whole or in part, in derivative works. However, other news organizations, nonprofit or for-profit, interested in republishing the stories can do so. See our "Publish our stories" guide.