UC Berkeley Journalism - Program - Investigative Reporting Faculty

Investigative Reporting Faculty and Lecturers

Faculty

Lowell Bergman (Professor)
Lowell Bergman was one of the founders of the Center for Investigative Reporting. He spent 22 years as a producer first with ABC News and then CBS, where he was a staff producer at 60 Minutes. Since leaving CBS in 1999, he has been a correspondent and producer for PBS FRONTLINE and a reporter for The New York Times. A series he co-authored on worker safety for The New York Times in a joint project with FRONTLINE won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. It was the first time a print/television collaboration was recognized by both a Pulitzer and its equivalent in broadcasting, the Peabody and Alfred I. DuPont awards. Bergmans earlier work on the CIA and cocaine, corruption in Mexico and the war on drugs has been the recipient of DuPonts, Peabody Awards and Emmys. His investigation of the tobacco industry for 60 Minutes was chronicled in the feature film, The Insider. Bergman graduated from the University of Wisconsin and was a graduate fellow in philosophy at the University of California at San Diego.

Lecturers

Rob Gunnison (Lecturer)
Rob Gunnison is Director of School Affairs at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. He arrived in 1999 after writing for 15 years for the San Francisco Chronicle in Sacramento, CA where he covered State government and politics with an emphasis on budget and tax issues. Before that, he was Sacramento Bureau Manager for United Press International where he covered government and politics for 11 years. His reporting on the savings and loan debacle was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Mr. Gunnison teaches Reporting and Writing the News and has co-taught an investigative reporting class with Professor Bergman for six years.

Tim Reiterman (Lecturer)
Reiterman, a journalism graduate of bachelors and masters programs at UC Berkeley, has worked as a reporter and editor for more than 35 years. He is the author with the late John Jacobs of Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and His Peoplewidely recognized as the definitive book on the Jonestown tragedy. He has worked as a reporter for the Associated Press, as an investigative team member and city editor for the San Francisco Examiner, and as a projects editor and reporter for the Los Angeles Times, where he currently covers criminal justice, prisons and state government topics for the Times. As an editor for the paper, he helped supervise Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Los Angeles riots and the Northridge earthquake. And he oversaw a prize-winning 20-month study of homicides in Los Angeles County during the O.J. Simpson murder case, as well as a worldwide investigation of the finances of the International Olympic Committee.

Steve Talbot (Lecturer)
In a career of more than 25 years in public television, Stephen Talbot has written and produced over 30 documentaries, including ten films for the PBS series, Frontline. Along the way, he has won nearly every major award in the field Emmys, Peabodys, a DuPont, a George Polk, even an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America. His most recent work is News War: Whats Happening to the News (2007) a 90-min. Frontline report on the state of the news media with reporter Lowell Bergman. Talbot is also the Series Editor for Frontline/World, Frontlines international news magazine, where he helps commission and supervise broadcast stories and oversees the series web site. Talbot was senior producer for two Frontline/World stories that won Emmys in 2007: Saddams Road to Hell, a broadcast story, and Libya: Out of the Shadow, an online video. Some of Talbots Frontline documentaries include: Justice for Sale with Bill Moyers, Spying on Saddam, Why America Hates the Press, The Long March of Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaughs America, The Heartbeat of America about the travails of General Motors, and The Best Campaign Money Can Buy. In 2004, he was the correspondent for the Frontline program, Diet Wars. In 2005 he went to Lebanon and Syria for Frontline/World to produce The Earthquake, a report on the political turmoil there. Talbot began his public television career in 1980 as a staff reporter and producer at KQED in San Francisco where he did local investigative reporting and a series of PBS biographies of writers, such as Dashiell Hammett, Beryl Markham, Maxine Hong Kingston, Carlos Fuentes and Ken Kesey. He also produced numerous feature reports for The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour.

Sharon Tiller (Lecturer)
Sharon Tiller joined FRONTLINE in 1995 as senior producer for special projects. In that role she has overseen and helped shape numerous programs for the series, including the critically acclaimed four-part special "Drug Wars." Other projects include So You Want to Buy a President, Why America Hates the Press, Fooling with Nature, "Secrets of the SAT, and Blackout. In 1997, she helped establish and runs the "FRONTLINE West" project at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where producers-in-residence work with graduates of the documentary program on a number of FRONTLINE and World projects each academic year. In 2001, Tiller and executive producer David Fanning jointly developed an international news magazine series FRONTLINE/World that is housed at the journalism school and features the work of a new generation of video journalists. As Series Executive Director, she has helped develop seventy-five broadcast stories and seventy Web-exclusive videos. Before joining FRONTLINE, Tiller was the executive director for the San Francisco-based Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), where in 1989 she launched an independent documentary unit. As executive producer, she developed seven investigative documentaries for FRONTLINE: Global Dumping Ground with Bill Moyers, The Great American Bailout, Best Campaign Money Can Buy, Your Loan Is Denied, The Politics of Power, Public Lands, Private Profits, and School Colors. Tiller has received three Dupont-Columbia University Broadcast Journalism Awards, a George Polk Award for National Television Reporting, a World Affairs Council Award of Excellence for International Reporting, two National Education Writers First Prizes for Documentary Television, three National Emmys and the George Foster Peabody Award for "Drug Wars," as well as the Overseas Press Club Edward R. Murrow Award for the 2004 season of FRONTLINE/World.

More than fifty Journalism School graduates have worked as Frontline/WORLD staff or helped produce stories since 2002.

Previous Instructors

David Weir (Lecturer)
David Weir is a Lokey Visiting Professor of Journalism at Stanford. He's a veteran journalist who was formerly Editor in Chief of 7x7 magazine in S.F.; Executive VP and Acting Radio News Director at KQED; an investigative reporter for Rolling Stone; a senior editor of California magazine; Managing Editor of Mother Jones; an editorial writer for the San Francisco Examiner; and co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR). He's authored or co-authored three books, including the textbook Raising Hell: How the Center for Investigative Reporting Gets the Story (with Dan Noyes, 1983); and over 150 articles for various publications (including the New York Times, the Economist, New York, the LA Weekly, Rolling Stone, New West, The Nation, Mother Jones, HotWired, Salon and many others). He is currently at work on his fourth book, a biography of Rolling Stone founder, editor and publisher Jann Wenner.