Educational outreach
We have been training a new generation of investigative journalists. Many of our published investigative news stories have been researched, reported and/or written by current students or recent graduates of the American University master’s program in journalism and public affairs.
Lewis, Perri, LaFleur and Sullivan teach journalism courses within the American University School of Communication, recruiting the best young reporters and researchers for Workshop projects — more than 180 since 2010. Nearly 90 percent of those students are working in journalism today.
RW also benefits from the expertise and wisdom of other participating professors with specialties in journalism, film and public communication.
Additionally, since 2010, we have offered paid internships to students from other universities, resulting in undergraduate and graduate participation from students at Arizona State University, Brooklyn College/CUNY, Brown University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Howard University, Ithaca College, New York University, Northwestern University, Princeton University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Missouri, and Vanderbilt University.
Professional outreach
Our staff has participated in numerous national and international conferences.
Lewis’ sixth book, “935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity,” was published June 24, 2014, by PublicAffairs (a member of the Perseus Books group, based in New York). Between 1996 and 2004, Lewis co-authored five books with his Center for Public Integrity reporters/writers, and the last book, “The Buying of the President 2004,” was a nationwide bestseller. Three of his co-authored Center books were finalists for the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) book award. He has taken a national and international leadership role in helping to develop what he calls “the new journalism ecosystem” of nonprofit news organizations. Since 2007, he has written 20 articles about the condition and future of nonprofit journalism, some of them in national publications, such as CJR (he is a contributing editor there), Harvard University’s Nieman Watchdog and the IRE Journal, and he has served on 13 nonprofit boards and advisory boards.
In July 2012, he was invited and agreed to serve on the George Polk Award panel of advisors. Since 2007, he also has spoken publicly in the U.S. and abroad on more than 30 occasions at national and international journalism conferences throughout the United States and in Australia, Germany, Argentina, Egypt, England (Oxford University), Italy, Japan, Jordan, Norway and Ukraine.
In 2010, he addressed the national conferences of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the Online News Association (ONA), where he presented The New Journalism Ecosystem, the first major report, detailed roster and national interactive map and database profiling 60 of “the most interesting and credible nonprofit, online publishers in the United States.” In late November 2011, Lewis, Kate Musselwhite and Brittney Butts updated and extended it to 75 nonprofit news publishers.
In June 2012, at the national IRE conference in Boston, Lewis moderated the most heavily attended panel (out of more than 100) there, entitled “Investigating Power.” His project by this name is an ongoing work in progress thus far involving 23 producers, researchers and web designers and 100 hours of high definition interview material shot and edited over the past five years.
Lewis, Perri, LaFleur and Sullivan have all led panel discussions, given presentations and workshops or participated at the national meetings of the Investigative Reporters and Editors; the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting; the Online News Association; J-Lab; Google; the University of California (Berkeley) Logan Symposium and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
We also co-created and sponsored a ScraperWiki conference in Washington, D.C., and in the spring of 2014, we co-sponsored an IRE advanced statistics workshop at the School of Communication.
In the fall of 2017, we co-sponsored a Mind to Mind conference with Reveal News, bringing together academics and journalists, and a conference with POLITICO and the Maynard Institute titled “The Press & Politics: Navigating Your Washington Journalism Career in a Turbulent Times.”
