Closing the Gender Gap: Women in Investigative Reporting

Date & Time:

From 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM on April 14, 2016

Location:

CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Room 308

Lisa Armstrong

In a 2013 blog post, Sheila Coronel, director of the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism wrote:  “A quick look at the 100 or so nonprofit investigative reporting centers, funds and associations worldwide shows that the face of watchdog journalism is male.”

Part of the problem is that investigative reporting involves digging into political corruption, crime, and things that people are often doing their best to hide, and so comes with some risk. The question is whether women journalists, who might be seen as being more physically vulnerable, are as up to the task of investigative reporting as men.

Please join us for a discussion with panelists Sarah Childress, senior digital reporter for Frontline; Esther Kaplan, editor of The Nation’s Investigative Fund; and Kendall Taggart, investigative reporter at BuzzFeed, who will talk about their own work, barriers they have faced, and ways they have overcome them.

This event is part of the “Women in Media” series sponsored by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism’s Diversity Committee.

Admission is free but registration is required. RSVP here.

Panelists:

Sarah Childress

Sarah Childress is a senior digital reporter for FRONTLINE. Previously, she covered Iraq for Newsweek and sub-Saharan Africa for The Wall Street Journal, and edited reporters in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America for GlobalPost. Her work has also been published in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Esther Kaplan

Esther Kaplan is editor of the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. She has written for Harper’s, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Nation, The American Prospect, In These Times, The Village Voice, and other publications. She is the author of With God on Their Side: George W. Bush and the Christian Right (New Press), which Ms. magazine called “a frightening and necessary read.” She was a 2013 fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation.

Kendall Taggart

Kendall Taggart is a reporter at BuzzFeed. She works on long-term, investigative projects and has written about charity scams, judges who violate the law, and environmental health issues.  Previously, she was a reporter at The Center for Investigative Reporting. While there, she worked on “America’s Worst Charities,” a project about nonprofits that claimed to support causes like aiding terminally ill children and police officers, but funneled many of the donations to themselves or for-profit fundraising companies. The project was honored with the Gold Bartlett & Steele award for investigative business journalism. @KendallTTaggart

Moderator: Lisa Armstrong, a journalist and visiting associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. She has reported from several countries, including Ethiopia, The Philippines, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Tajikistan, and from Haiti from 2010 to 2014 through grants from The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and NYU. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Essence, The New York Times and other outlets, and has won multiple awards, including a National Press Club award for online journalism, and a Webby, for her “Voices of Haiti” ibook, which was a compilation of the blog posts and multimedia work done with her Pulitzer Center colleagues. She currently has grants from The Investigative Fund and The Carter Center to report on juveniles who have been sentenced to life without parole.