Adam Clay "A.C." Thompson (born c.1972 [1] ) is an investigative journalist, producer, and staff reporter with ProPublica . [2] His work has appeared on the PBS series Frontline . His stories, many of which examine the criminal justice system, have helped lead to the exoneration of two innocent San Francisco men sentenced to life in prison and the prosecution of seven New Orleans police officers. [2]
Before going into journalism, Thompson held many jobs, including pharmaceutical study test subject, trash collector, bike messenger, punk band roadie, and a martial arts fighter. He was in Afghanistan, where he was reporting for a book written with Trevor Paglen, a Ph.D researcher at UC Berkeley. [3]
Thompson was a reporter for the San Francisco Bay Guardian , SF Weekly , and the Center for Investigative Reporting. [3]
He was faculty at New College of California, an instructor in the Media Studies Graduate Program, and teaches at the Raising Our Voices program, to train street reporters. [4]
| Year | Air Date(s) | Title | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | August 16 and 25 | Law and Disorder | An investigation, in collaboration with The Times-Picayune/The New Orleans Advocate, into charges and the cover up of illegal use of force by the New Orleans Police Department against citizens |
| 2012 | February 21, June 28 | The Child Cases | An investigation, in collaboration with NPR, into deaths of children, for which people were wrongly convicted or imprisoned based on unreliable or wrong medical evidence |
| 2013 | July 30, September 24 | Life and Death in Assisted Living | An investigation into Emeritus Senior Living, the largest assisted-living company in America |
| 2015 | August 15, November 3 | Terror in Little Saigon | An investigation into unsolved murders of Vietnamese-American journalists |
| 2018 | August 7 | Documenting Hate: Charlottesville | An investigation into the 2017 Unite the Right rally and the under preparedness of the local law enforcement |
| 2018 | February 4, June 18, November 20 | Documenting Hate: New American Nazis | An investigation following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, focusing on American white supremacist groups, specifically Atomwaffen Division |
| 2021 | April 13 | American Insurrection (2021) | An investigation, in collaboration with Berkeley Journalism's Investigative Reporting Program, into far-right extremist groups (eg. the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers)following the 2017 Charlottesville car attack and rally |
| 2022 | January 4 | American Insurrection (2022) | An update of the original, including more recent events |
| 2022 | March 29 | Plot to Overturn the Election | An investigation into the misinformation and causes that lead to the January 6 United States Capitol attack |
| 2023 | June 13 | America's Dangerous Trucks | An investigation into deadly accidents between passenger vehicles and large trucks (eg. Semi-trailer truck) |
Lowell Bergman is an American journalist, television producer and professor of journalism. In a career spanning nearly five decades Bergman worked as a producer, a reporter, and then the director of investigative reporting at ABC News and as a producer for CBS's 60 Minutes, leaving in 1998 as the senior producer of investigations for CBS News. He also was the founder of the investigative reporting program at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and for 28 years taught there as professor. He was also a producer/correspondent for the PBS documentary series Frontline. In 2019, Bergman retired.
SF Weekly is an online music publication and formerly alternative weekly newspaper founded in the 1970s in San Francisco, California. It was distributed every Thursday, and was published by the San Francisco Print Media Company. The paper has won national journalism awards, and sponsored the SF Weekly Music Awards.
Robert Earle Parry was an American investigative journalist. He was known for his role in covering the Iran–Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek, including breaking the Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare and the CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking in the U.S. scandal in 1985.
Jacob Charles "Jack" Landau was an American journalist, attorney, government official, and free-speech activist. He was the founding first executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Renée Montagne is an American radio journalist and was the co-host of National Public Radio's weekday morning news program, Morning Edition, from May 2004 to November 11, 2016. Montagne and Inskeep succeeded longtime host Bob Edwards, initially as interim replacements, and Greene joined the team in 2012. Montagne had served as a correspondent and occasional host since 1989. She usually broadcasts from NPR West in Culver City, California, a Los Angeles suburb.
T. Christian Miller is an investigative reporter, editor, author, and war correspondent for ProPublica. He has focused on how multinational corporations operate in foreign countries, documenting human rights and environmental abuses. Miller has covered four wars — Kosovo, Colombia, Israel and the West Bank, and Iraq. He also covered the 2000 presidential campaign. He is also known for his work in the field of computer-assisted reporting and was awarded a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in 2012 to study innovation in journalism. In 2016, Miller was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism with Ken Armstrong of The Marshall Project. In 2019, he served as a producer of the Netflix limited series Unbelievable, which was based on the prize-winning article. In 2020, Miller shared the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with other reporters from ProPublica and The Seattle Times. With Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi, Miller co-won the 2020 award for his reporting on United States Seventh Fleet accidents.
The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) is a nonprofit news organization based in Emeryville, California. It was founded in 1977 as the nation’s first nonprofit investigative journalism organization, and has since grown into a multi-platform newsroom, with investigations published on the Reveal website, public radio show and podcast, video pieces and documentaries and social media platforms, reaching over a million people weekly. The public radio show and podcast, “Reveal,” co-produced with PRX, is CIR’s flagship distribution platform, airing on 588 stations nationwide. The newsroom focuses on reporting that reveals inequities, abuse, and corruption, and holds those responsible accountable.
Daniel L. Golden is an American journalist, working as a senior editor for ProPublica. He was previously senior editor at Conde Nast's now-defunct Portfolio magazine, and a managing editor for Bloomberg News.
Trevor Paglen is an American artist, geographer, and author whose work tackles mass surveillance and data collection.
John Mecklin is a journalist, novelist and editor, who specializes in narrative journalism. He was the editor-in-chief of Miller-McCune, a national public policy magazine named after its founder, Sara Miller McCune. Mecklin is currently the editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Abrahm Lustgarten is a senior environmental reporter for ProPublica who frequently works in partnership with the New York Times Magazine. He focuses on the intersections of business, climate and energy.
Ryan Gabrielson is an American investigative journalist. He has won a George Polk Award, and Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.
California Watch, part of the nonprofit Center for Investigative Reporting, began producing stories in 2009. The official launch of the California Watch website took place in January 2010. The team was best known for producing well researched and widely distributed investigative stories on topics of interest to Californians. In small ways, the newsroom pioneered in the digital space, including listing the names of editors and copy editors at the bottom of each story, custom-editing stories for multiple partners, developing unique methods to engage with audiences and distributing the same essential investigative stories to newsrooms across the state. It worked with many news outlets, including newspapers throughout the state, all of the ABC television affiliates in California, KQED radio and television and dozens of websites. The Center for Investigative Reporting created California Watch with $3.5 million in seed funding. The team won several industry awards for its public interest reporting, including the George Polk Award in 2012. In addition to numerous awards won for its investigative reports, the California Watch website also won an Online Journalism Award in the general excellence category from the Online News Association in its first year of existence.
The Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award is presented annually by Colby College to a member of the newspaper profession who has contributed to the country's journalistic achievement. The award is named for Elijah Parish Lovejoy, and established in 1952.
Ginger Thompson is an American journalist and a senior reporter at ProPublica. A 2001 Pulitzer Prize Winner in National Reporting and finalist for the National Magazine Award, she spent 15 years at The New York Times, including time as a Washington correspondent and as an investigative reporter whose stories revealed Washington’s secret, sometimes tragic, role in Mexico’s fight against drug traffickers.
Hannah Dreier is an American journalist. She is a New York Times reporter who specializes in narrative features and investigations. She previously worked at ProPublica, where she was the recipient of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, and The Washington Post, where she was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. She was Venezuela correspondent for The Associated Press during the first four years of the administration of President Nicolas Maduro.
Lena Groeger is an American investigative journalist, graphic designer and news application developer at ProPublica. She creates data visualizations and interactive databases on a variety of subjects, including education, politics and healthcare. She also writes about design's role in society in a series called Visual Evidence. In addition to her work at ProPublica, her science writing has appeared in Scientific American, Wired, Forbes, and Slate.
Julia Angwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American investigative journalist, New York Times bestselling author, and entrepreneur. She was a co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the impact of technology on society. She was a senior reporter at ProPublica from 2014 to April 2018 and staff reporter at the New York bureau of The Wall Street Journal from 2000 to 2013. Angwin is author of non-fiction books, Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (2009) and Dragnet Nation (2014). She is a winner and two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Bernice Yeung is an investigative journalist for ProPublica where she covers labor and unemployment. She is the author of In a Day's Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America's Most Vulnerable Workers, which was published in 2018 by The New Press and examines the hidden stories of blue-collar workers overlooked by the #MeToo movement. The book is based on reporting that Yeung began in 2012 when she was a reporter for Reveal, and it was honored with the 2018 Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice, the 2019 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. She is currently based in Berkeley, California.