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IRE Reporting Conference Speakers' Bios
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Brant Houston is executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., and an associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He is also author of Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide. Before becoming executive director, he was managing director of The National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR) and before that, a daily journalist for 17 years. He worked at The Hartford Courant, The Kansas City Star, and several news organizations in the Boston area. His experience included stints on the investigative and projects desks at the Courant and the Star and different beats, including city hall, courts, health, politics, and general assignment.

David Dietz is a senior editor at Bloomberg News, running investigations and enterprise from San Francisco. He was formerly at TheStreet.com and the San Francisco Chronicle. In a 30-year journalism career, he has run business and sports sections and once wrote a personal finance column. He has covered topics from Wall Street fraud to judicial corruption, and won numerous reporting awards.

Stuart Watson has been a member of IRE since 1986. He's a two-time winner of the George Foster Peabody award, a two-time winner of the IRE award, and a winner of the duPont-Columbia award. Stuart has been reporting for WCNC-TV in Charlotte since January 1999. He came to NBC6 from WRAL-TV in Raleigh, where he spent four years as an investigative reporter. Prior to WRAL-TV, he was an investigative reporter at WKRN-TV in Nashville, Tennessee.

Charles Davis is an assistant professor of journalism and director of the Freedom of Information Center at the Missouri School of Journalism. Davis worked for nearly 10 years as a journalist and continues to write for business and legal publications. His first edited book, Access Denied: Freedom of Information in the Information Age, was just published by Iowa State University Press. Davis has earned numerous journalism awards, including a Sunshine Award from SPJ for his work in furthering freedom of information.

James Neff received IRE’s Thomas Renner Prize for his book Mobbed Up. He also wrote Unfinished Murder, a work of literary non-fiction about rape and law enforcement. His current project, Chasing the Fugitive, is a re-investigation of the Sam Sheppard murder case. He is president of IRE Board of Directors.

Mark Lagerkvist a 20-year IRE veteran, is the investigative reporter at News 12 Long Island. He has won more than 60 journalism honors, including an IRE Award. Prior to joining News 12, Lagerkvist was investigative projects editor at the Asbury Park Press. His career also includes reporting positions at newspapers and television stations in Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida.

Leon Dash teaches journalism and Afro-American studies at The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Dash is best known for his work at The Washington Post where, in a career that spanned three decades, he wrote about some of Washington's most troubled citizens. He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism for "Rosa Lee's Story," a series about an aging heroin addict and her life with her eight children, five grandchildren, mother and other relatives. He has also written about teen-age pregnancy, young male murderers, and the drug addictions of prison guards. While at The Post, he reported from Angola -- were he walked 2,100 miles in the company of guerillas to cover the war there -- Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Martinique and St. Thomas. He was assistant foreign editor, West Africa Bureau Chief and a member of the investigative unit.

Rosemary Armao is managing editor of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. She was chief of the Anne Arundel County Bureau of The Baltimore Sun and spent three years as executive director of IRE before that. She also worked at The Virginian-Pilot, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and UPI. She is a graduate of Syracuse University and holds a masters from Ohio State University.

Neil Reisner is executive editor at the Miami Daily Business Review, an award-winning paper dedicated to business and law, money and power in South Florida. He previously worked at The Miami Herald as a computer-assisted reporting specialist, part-time assignment editor and education reporter. A former NICAR training director, Reisner also has worked for The Bergen Record and The Home News, both in New Jersey. Reisner, 48, has taught at Columbia University, Rutgers University and Florida International University and has won a number of journalism awards. He has contributed to several journalism texts and other books and has written for Columbia Journalism Review, American Journalism Review,The Non-Profit Times, New Jersey Monthly and other publications.

Drew Sullivan is a freelance reporter. He formerly was on the projects team for The Tennessean in Nashville, worked as the news data manager on the Associated Press's special assignment team in New York City and taught investigative reporting and computer-assisted reporting at New York University. He was a student employee at IRE and was NICAR's first database administrator. Before becoming a journalist, Sullivan worked as a structural dynamicist on the Space Shuttle project for Rockwell Space Systems. He has an aerospace engineering degree from Texas A&M and attended the masters program at the University of Missouri.

Greg Reeves is database editor of The Kansas City Star. He has contributed to many CAR projects since 1989, including a Polk Award-winning series on the NCAA in 1997, a Pulitzer-finalist series on urban sprawl in 1994, and a series on the U.S. Department of Agriculture for which reporters Mike McGraw and Jeff Taylor won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and an SPJ award. Among his latest work has been the Star's series on the high rate of AIDS among Catholic priests, a series which has angered some and generated heated discussions among members of the Catholic church and others.

Joel Kaplan teaches investigative reporting and communications law at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Prior to that, Kaplan covered City Hall for The Chicago Tribune and was a member of the newspaper's investigative team. From 1979 to 1986, he was a reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville where he covered the state legislature. In 1986, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting for a series on then U.S. Rep. Bill Boner. He is a co-author of Murder of Innocence: The Tragic Life and Final Rampage of Laurie Dann (Warner Books). The movie version of that book ran on CBS in Nov. 1993. He was a Nieman Fellow (1985) at Harvard University and a Journalism Fellow at Yale Law School(1991), where he received a masters in the study of law. He also has a masters in journalism from the University of Illinois and a bachelors in arts from Vanderbilt University. He currently is an associate professor at the Newhouse School. He is also a contributing editor to Chicago Magazine.

David Boardman is assistant managing editor for projects and investigations at The Seattle Times. He directed The Times' series on abuses in the federal tribal-housing program, which won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. Previously, he supervised and edited coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and its aftermath, which won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. He also was editor and lead writer of articles on allegations of sexual molestation by U.S. Sen. Brock Adams, coverage that won several national awards, including the Associated Press Managing Editors Public Service Award, the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and the Goldsmith Prize in Investigative Reporting, and was a finalist for the 1993 Pulitzer in Public Service.

Shawn McIntosh is the executive editor of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss. Before joining the Ledger as managing editor two years ago, she served as a projects and investigations editor at The Dallas Morning News and USA TODAY. More than a decade ago she was a reporter at the Ledger. She got her start in computer- assisted reporting studying under Phil Meyer at the University of North Carolina J-school.

Rose Ciotta is a staff writer and assistant director of Computer Assisted Reporting/Analysis for The Philadelphia Inquirer. She has worked on data projects on a variety of topics including illegal drugs, campaign finance, sprawl, property taxes, courts, and transportation. She joined The Inquirer in 1998 from The Buffalo News where she was the computer-assisted reporting editor and an investigative reporter. She was awarded a John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. She has taught CAR at SUNY College at Buffalo and Rowan University in New Jersey. She was elected to the IRE board in 1993 and can be reached at rciotta@phillynews.com

Stephen C. Miller is assistant to the technology editor at The New York Times. He oversees the training of reporters and editors in the use of new technologies and helps determine the news department's computer and telecommunications needs. He also writes on computers and consumer electronics for the paper. He is completing his book, “While Our Backs Were Turned: How Computers Changed Journalism.”

Paul Adrian is currently a broadcast freelancer. Adrian previously served as investigative reporter at News of Texas, WTNH-TV in Connecticut and at WBNS-TV in Columbus, Ohio. Before those stations, he reported for WAVE-TV in Louisville, Kentucky and KETK-TV in East Texas, where he began his journalism career in 1989.

Jo Craven McGinty won a Pulitzer Prize in 1999 for her work on the Washington Post series, "Deadly Force," about homicides by District Columbia police. She now works for IRE/NICAR and teaches computer-assisted reporting at the Missouri School of Journalism. She also has worked at newspapers in North Carolina.

John Ullmann is executive director of The World Press Institute (WPI). The program is a four-month fellowship program for non U.S. journalists. WPI is in its 41st year and has more than 450 graduates in 93 countries. Ullmann is a frequent consultant and speaker in this and other countries on investigative reporting topics and the role of a free press in a democracy. He is a former assistant managing editor for projects at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. Projects he supervised during his six years won more than four dozen awards, including the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting. The previous five years he was executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and started most of its programs, including its journal and electronic library. He is the originator, co-editor and co-author of The Reporter's Handbook: An investigator's guide to documents and records, and author of Investigative Reporting: Advance methods and techniques, which will be reissued next year in an expanded edition by Waveland Press. Ullmann has a B.S. from Butler University, M.A. from American University, and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri. He taught 19 years (full or part time) at the Universities of Alaska-Fairbanks, Missouri, Wisconsin-Eau Claire, Minnesota, and Florida. Countries where he has given seminars of a week or more include Mexico, Honduras, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkey, and Thailand.

Jennifer LaFleur is the computer-assisted reporting editor for the St.Louis Post-Dispatch where she writes, analyzes, edits and coaches her way through data-based stories. Before that, she developed the computer-assisted reporting program at San Jose Mercury News as database editor there for four years. Before joining the Mercury News, she was training director for the Investigative Reporters and Editor's National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. At NICAR she trained journalists across the United States, Bulgaria and Finland in CAR techniques. She is the FOIA Committee Chair for Investigative Reporters and Editors and has done computer-assisted reporting for a number of publications since 1988. She has never won an Olympic gold medal, but does have an extensive collection of PEZ dispensers.

Dianna Hunt, 42, is a senior reporter for enterprise and investigations at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She joined the Star-Telegram’s newly created projects team last year after spending nearly five years at the Dallas Morning News. Before that, she worked 13 years at the Houston Chronicle, including seven years as a special projects reporter. She also worked at the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. She has won numerous state, local and national awards for investigative reporting, freedom of information issues, spots news coverage and feature writing. Hunt is a 1981 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. She is a member of IRE, the Native American Journalists Association and the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. She is married with an 8-year-old son

Diana Henriques is veteran investigative business reporter for the New York Times where she specializes in financial fraud, white-collar crime and corporate governance issues. Her articles have prompted several criminal prosecutions and statewide reforms.The editors of The Times have nominate Henriques for the Pulitzer Prize five times, and she is a winner of the prestigious Gerald R. Loeb Award for Business Journalism. She was formerly a feature reporter for Barron's, and she is the author of "Fidelity's World: The Secret Life and Public Power of the Mutual Fund Giant" and, more recently, "The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders." According to a review at the Global Investor Bookshop Web site, "'Fidelity's World' takes readers behind the polished public relations image and examines the private faces of Fidelity: the personalities of the two eccentric but little-known men who built the empire, the people they recruited to turn their ideas into reality, and the methods sometimes subtle, occasionally brash and brutal, that they have used to remake their industry and to reshape the investing habits of millions of Americans."

David Raziq is the Investigative Producer for KHOU-TV, Houston, TX, where he and his team 'broke' the Firestone Tire Defect story that lead to an international product recall. A former investigative producer for "20/20", he has won numerous national awards for his investigative reports including the I.R.E. Award and Medal, the Columbia-Dupont Award, The Scripps Howard Award, The National U.P.I. Award and the National Society of Professional Journalists Award. This last honor he received for investigations he did as a student at the University of Missouri-Columbia where he also studied computer-assisted journalism. Recently he has been a guest-faculty member at the prestigious Poynter Institute for Journalism.

Victor Merina is a Ford Foundation diversity fellow working for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. At Poynter, he writes essays and organizes material for Poynter's online site that covers issues of diversity and race relations. A 1998-99 Media Studies Center fellow, he was a writer at the Los Angeles Times for nearly 20 years. As an investigative reporter at the Times, he was a member of the paper's special projects team and worked on a series---"And Justice for Some: Solving Murders in Los Angeles County"---which was a 1997 Pulitzer finalist and won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Gold Medal and the Society of Professional Journalists headliner award. He also shared in the Times' 1993 Pulitzer for "spot news" coverage of the Los Angeles riots. A former national board member of the Asian American Journalists Association, Victor has a B.A. degree from UCLA and an M.S. from Columbia University. For the last two years, he has taken part in the "Race and Ethnicity Workshop" at Columbia, was a featured speaker at the National Writers Workshop and delivered keynote addresses for the SPJ Southern Regional Conference and for the Carol Burnett Lecture at the University of Hawaii. He has been a senior lecturer at the University of Southern California School of Journalism, and this fall, began duties as a teaching fellow at the UC Berkeley School of Journalism.

Steve Doig is the Knight Chair in Journalism, specializing in computer-assisted reporting, at Arizona State University. He joined the faculty in 1996 after a 23-year career in newspapers, including 19 years at The Miami Herald. Major computer-assisted projects on which he worked at The Herald have won numerous awards, including: The Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1993, for What Went Wrong, an analysis of the damage patterns from Hurricane Andrew that showed how weakened building codes and poor construction practices contributed to the extent of the disaster. Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting in 1994, for Lost in America, an examination of how the nation's immigration policies have failed. Investigative Reporters and Editors Grand Prize in 1995, for Crime and No Punishment, a probe into why South Florida had the highest crime rate and the lowest incarceration rate of any major metropolitan area in the country.

Mike McGraw is a special projects reporter and reporting coach for The Kansas City Star. He joined the newspaper in 1989. Previously he worked for The Hartford Courant covering workplace issues, the defense industry and a major building collapse; and for The Des Moines Register covering agribusiness, the workplace and the meatpacking industry. He has won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, the Polk Award for National Reporting and the SPJ Award for Non-Deadline Reporting.

Ken Wells is correspondents editor for Page One of The Wall Street Journal. He runs a small team of reporters who write exclusively for the front page on issues such as race, immigration and the environment. He still occasionally writes features under his own byline and for the past seven years has supplemented the Journal's coverage of South Africa's emerging democracy. In 1982, Ken joined the Journal as a reporter in the San Francisco bureau. He transferred to the London bureau in 1990 and became the Journal's point man for the coverage of the environmental aftermath of the Persian Gulf War. He became a special writer with the page-one staff in New York in July 1993 and was named correspondents editor in June 1994. In 1994, he received the American Society of Newspaper Editors distinguished writing award for headline writing. Previously, he worked for the Houma (La.) Courier, the Columbia Missourian, and the Miami Herald. In 1982, while at the Herald, he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in the general reporting category for his coverage of a drought gripping the Florida Everglades.

Dawn Fallik works on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch CAR team as a reporter and datachick. Before moving to St. Louis in July 2000 (her 10th city in 10 years,) she worked as the data library administrator for the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, taught beginning journalism and somehow got a graduate degree. She covered executions, agriculture conferences and rent-a-cow companies for several years at The Associated Press and was the education/night cops reporter for three years at The (Troy) Record where she won awards for investigative reporting, spot news and column writing.

Terry Ganey is a state government reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and has been a member of IRE since 1978. He was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting in 1993. He had written a series of stories about a corrupt Missouri workers' compensation program known as the Second Injury Fund. The stories helped send nine men to federal prison. He is the author of two New York Times' bestsellers: Under the Influence: The Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty (co-authored with Peter Hernon) and Innocent Blood, a true story of terror and justice.

Jacqui Banaszynski holds the Knight Chair at the Missouri School of Journalism and is assistant managing editor/Sunday at The Seattle Times. She is a 1988 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for her series "AIDS in the Heartland". A magnacum laude graduate of Marquette University, she has worked at the Janesville (Wis.) Gazette, the Duluth News-Tribune and Herald, the Eugene (Ore.) Register-Guard, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the St. Paul Pioneer Press and The Oregonian. Banaszynski has taught at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, the Poynter Institute and the University of Kansas.

Tom Spalding is the day public safety reporter for the Indianapolis Star. Tom joined the Star in December 2000 after working the judicial beat for the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune, a small paper that ranked No. 35 in Columbia Journalism Review's list of top 100 papers for 1999. Spalding won several Florida awards for breaking news and feature articles and last June covered the high-profile Texas trial of Allen Blackthorne, accused of the murder-for-hire of his ex-wife, a mother of quadruplets. Tom can relate to the struggles of maintaining a busy, competitive police beat while using computer-assisted reporting techniques to highlight important issues. In his third month at the Star he created his own database to show that despite a drop in the homicide rate in Indianapolis/Marion County in 2000 from the record high of 1998, young black males didn't share in the decline.

James V. Grimaldi is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post. For the past year, he has been legal affairs reporter, covering the Microsoft antitrust trial, Firestone tire recall, Florida presidential election fight and President Clinton's last-minute pardons. Prior to joining the Post, he worked in the Washington bureau of The Seattle Times and at the Orange Country Register. The MU graduate has won many national and local awards.

Judy Miller is an assistant managing editor at The Miami Herald and heads the paper's investigative team. She supervised a voter fraud investigation that was awarded the Pulitizer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 1999 and coverage of a bus shelter electrocution that was a 1999 finalist for spot news. She is the chairman of IRE Board of Directors.