John Sullivan

John Sullivan

Senior Editor

John Sullivan, a Pulitzer Prize winner from The Philadelphia Inquirer, is a reporter and Associate Investigations Editor on The Washington Post’s Investigations team, an investigative reporter-in-residence at American University and a senior editor at the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

He pairs grad students with various investigative teams inside the Post; students research, build databases, fact-check and interview. Sullivan also teaches an investigative practicum at the graduate level.

Sullivan was a senior lecturer and assistant director of Medill Watchdog and on the journalism faculty at Northwestern University, after working for nearly a decade at The Inquirer, where his assignments included covering the war in Iraq, state government, city hall, science and health and was a member of the paper’s investigative team.

His stories have forced officials to answer for systemic failings and to undertake an overhaul of the city’s child welfare system (winner of a Casey Medal in 2007); to restructure the criminal courts after it was shown that people charged with violent crimes escaped conviction on all charges in almost two-thirds of cases (winner of several national awards and finalist for the Selden Ring, 2010) and to terminate a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency program that had allowed corporate polluters to burnish their green image (a finalist for a Pulitzer in 2009).

Most recently Sullivan led a team of five reporters who examined violence in the Philadelphia schools. The series won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2012, a Casey Medal and the IRE Award.

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