Board of Directors

The IRE Board of Directors serves as the governing body of IRE.

David Cay Johnston (president), an IRE Medal winner and Pulitzer Prize recipient, is a columnist for Tax Analysts and the Columbia Journalism Review. He also teaches the law of the ancient world at Syracuse University’s law and management schools. Since 1967, when he was 18, Johnston’s investigations have exposed LAPD abuses, corrupt news organizations, cost a worldwide CEO his job, sent at least eight people to prison, found a killer the police failed to catch which won freedom for an innocent man, and revealed that Donald Trump had a negative net worth. Since 1968 he has been a staff reporter at San Jose Mercury, Detroit Free Press, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The New York Times and was a Reuters columnist in 2011-12. Over two decades, Johnston is endowing IRE scholarships for young women investigative reporters of modest means. His book “Perfectly Legal,” exposing how the super-rich rigged the economy, was recognized with an IRE Medal. Like its sequel, Free Lunch, it was a bestseller. In 2012 The Fine Print completed his trilogy on the American economy. He is editing an anthology to be published in late 2013 titled DIVIDED: The Perils of Our Growing Inequality. (Originally elected 2009; current term expires June 2013.)He can be reached at davidcay@me.com.

Andrew Donohue (vice president) is the editor of voiceofsandiego.org, the pioneering nonprofit news organization that focuses on in-depth and investigative reporting on San Diego's quality-of-life issues. He has fostered VOSD's growth from a small ragtag group of reporters in a cramped, dark and dirty office to an established and expanding news outlet that's being replicated across the country. He can be reached at andrew2donohue@gmail.com. (Originally elected 2010; current term expires June 2014.)

Sarah Cohen (secretary) is the Knight professor at Duke University. She worked as a database editor at the Washington Post for more than 10 years, where she shared in the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, the Goldsmith award and the IRE medal. She also has worked as a reporter in Florida and as IRE’s training director. (Originally elected 2010; current term expires June 2014.)

Lea Thompson (treasurer) was a Chief Correspondent at Dateline, NBC for 16 years and headed the investigative unit and anchored at WRC-TV, Washington, for 15. She’s now doing documentaries and teaching investigative reporting. Thompson’s work was behind three acts of Congress and has brought about dozens of laws, recalls, and policy changes as well as TV movies and three books. She has won every major broadcast journalism award – including multiple IRE, Peabody, Polk, Murrow and National Emmy awards, the Loeb, duPont and 19 Regional Emmies. She can be reached at Thompson.lea@gmail.com. (Originally elected 2007; current term expires June 2013.)

Mc Nelly Torres  (executive member) is the associate director and reporter for Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, the first bilingual investigative startup focusing on state government issues. Most recently Torres was the stimulus team leader for EdMoney.org. Torres covered education at the San Antonio Express-News in Texas where her work contributed to the conviction of a school building architect. At the Morning News in South Carolina, she garnered local and state awards for her investigative work on the state's hog farm permit filing process. Her consumer watchdog stories at the Sun-Sentinel have won state, regional and national awards. Torres is a board member for the Investigative Reporters and Editors organization. Torres can be contacted at torres@fcir.org. (Originally elected 2008; current term expires June 2014.)

Manny Garcia (chairman, past president) is the executive editor of El Nuevo Herald. He is a former metro editor, special projects editor, courts and cops editor and member of The Miami Herald's I-team. Garcia was a key reporter and writer in The Herald's 1999 and 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations. He and Jason Grotto shared a 2004 IRE Award for their project "Justice Withheld." Garcia has done numerous seminars about journalism. (Originally elected 2006; current term expires June 2014.)

Robert Cribb is an investigative reporter at the Toronto Star, past president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, current president of the Canadian Association of Journalists Educational Foundation, a lecturer at Toronto's Ryerson University School of Journalism and co-author of "Digging Deeper: A Canadian Reporter's Research Guide" (Oxford University Press). He has worked closely with IRE on projects including the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Toronto and regional conferences co-hosted by the Canadian Association of Journalists and the IRE in Vancouver and Windsor, Ontario. His own news investigations over the past decade include series on serious food safety problems, exploitation of foreign workers, illegal slaughterhouses, fraudulent telemarketing boiler rooms, dangerous doctors, slum landlords, airline safety and government corruption. (Originally elected 2009; current term expires June 2014.)

Leonard Downie Jr. is vice president at large of The Washington Post, where he was executive editor from 1991 to 2008. During his 44 years in the Post newsroom, he also was an investigative reporter, editor on the local and national news staffs, London correspondent, and, from 1984 to 1991, managing editor under then executive editor Ben Bradlee. As deputy Metro editor from 1972 to 1974, Downie helped supervise the newspaper’s Watergate coverage. Beginning in August 2009, Downie will be Weil Family Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. He is currently working on a report on the future of American news reporting for the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of five books, including "The New Muckrakers" (about investigative reporters), "The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril" (with Robert G. Kaiser), and a novel, "The Rules of the Game," about an investigative reporter in Washington. (Originally elected 2009; current term expires June 2013.)

Ellen Gabler is a reporter/assistant editor on the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s investigative team. She previously worked at the Chicago Tribune, where she was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists for stories about dangerous baby products. She has also worked at the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal and the Stillwater (Minn.) Gazette. She can be reached at egabler@jrn.com. (Originally elected 2012; current term expires June 2014.)

Josh Meyer left the Los Angeles Times in early 2010 after being on staff for 20 years to become director of education and outreach for the new Medill National Security Journalism Initiative. He leads groups of post-graduate students on three-month investigative projects, teaches graduate-level classes on national security and is helping build the initiative into a full-fledged center that assists working journalists, students and educators in finding the best ways to do, and to teach, these kinds of journalism in this changing media environment—including covering terrorism, war, nuclear proliferation, intelligence and law enforcement reform. He is also co-author of "The Hunt for KSM: Chasing Down the Elusive Al Qaeda Mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," set for publication in 2012. Josh was an investigative reporter and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times for 20 years, covering a wide range of issues — including government, politics and law enforcement. He focused on terrorism and related national security issues from 2000 until 2010, most of that time in the paper’s Washington bureau. He has won or shared in numerous local, state and national awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes awarded to reporting teams he was on. (Originally elected 2011; current term expires June 2013.)

Matt Waite is a professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and co-founder of Hot Type Consulting LLC, a web development firm. From 2007-2011, he was a programmer/journalist for the St. Petersburg Times, where he developed the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact. Before that, he was an award-winning investigative reporter for the Times and co-author of "Paving Paradise: Florida's Vanishing Wetlands and the Failure of No Net Loss." (Originally elected 2011; current term expires June 2013.)

Stuart Watson, investigative reporter at WCNC-TV in Charlotte, N.C., has been an IRE member since 1986. That’s when a mentor told him how to be a real investigative reporter: “There’s a book: ‘The Reporter’s Handbook’. Read it. There’s an organization: IRE. Join it.” Since then Stuart has won the IRE Award twice and the Peabody Award three times. He has served on the board of directors three times and never let his membership lapse. (Originally elected 2012; current term expires June 2014.)

Alison Young does watchdog and enterprise reporting on health issues for USA Today. She previously wrote a weekly watchdog column called Spotlight for the Sunday Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Prior to the column’s debut in October 2008, she covered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the AJC. Young was a member of Knight Ridder’s Washington-based investigative team from 2003-2006. Before that, she spent 10 years at the Detroit Free Press, where she was a reporter, enterprise editor and the deputy metro editor. She also has reported for The Arizona Republic and the Dallas Times Herald. Her reporting has won many awards, including two Scripps Howard awards, two Gerald Loeb Awards, two National Headliners and honors from Sigma Delta Chi, the Heywood Broun Awards and the National Press Club. She can be reached at aayoung@usatoday.com. (Originally elected 2007; current term expires June 2013.)