Joe Stephens
joins IRW

About IRW

Dear Readers,

I’m thrilled to announce that after a nationwide search, Joe Stephens is joining the investigative Reporting Workshop as our new executive editor. He also accepted a position in the School of Communication as an Assistant Professor of Journalism.

Joe is a former award-winning investigative reporter at The Washington Post who has spent the last 10 years growing the journalism program at Princeton University and guiding his students’ impressive work to publication at a host of major news organizations.

His resume is deep and impressive. Joe is a three-time winner of the George Polk Award and a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the recipient of more than a dozen other national awards. Joe joined the Washington Post in 1999, where he was a member of the investigative projects team for more than 16 years. He has written extensively on presidential politics, political corruption, the war against terrorism, Afghan reconstruction, the federal judiciary, and drug experiments conducted on children in the developing world. He graduated from Miami University and began his career at The Kansas City Star before joining the Post.

Joe grew up learning about the world by reading his family’s daily newspaper, and he has a deep appreciation of the importance of reporting and sharing information as a democratic principle. His experience as an educator at Princeton uniquely prepares him for fostering partnerships among students, professionals, and academic experts — a hallmark of IRW.

His interactions with students, faculty, and staff at American University during the search process were warm, personal, and inspiring. We believe Joe is the perfect person to carry on the mission established in 2008 by our co-founders, Chuck Lewis and Wendell Cochran. Joe will join our newsroom and the classroom later in the year.

Thanks for all your support,

Lynne Perri
Interim Executive Editor