Wesley Lowery joins Berkeley Journalism as IRP’s Special Projects Editor

BERKELEY, CA — Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Wesley Lowery is joining Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program as Special Projects Editor this semester. Lowery is leading a team of graduate students investigating police misconduct in the United States, and he’s offering advice and guidance on other IRP investigations.

Lowery is currently a correspondent for 60 in 6, a new 60 Minutes program for the new mobile device streaming service Quibi.

Lowery comes from The Washington Post, where he was a national correspondent, covering law enforcement, justice and their intersection with politics and policy. He was the lead reporter on the paper’s “Fatal Force” project, which investigated deadly police shootings across the U.S. The project was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and the George Polk Award for national reporting in 2016.

He is author of the book “They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and a New Era in America’s Racial Justice Movement.”

“I couldn’t be more excited to work with the talented students at Berkeley Journalism,” said Lowery. “Criminal justice reporting is often best done as a big collaborative effort, and I know I’ll benefit as much if not more from working with the students as they do from working with me.”

“We’re blessed to have Wes working with us on a number of important projects at the Investigative Reporting Program,” said David Barstow, the Reva and David Logan Distinguished Chair in Investigative Journalism and head of the IRP. “Wes would make anyone’s list of the nation’s best investigative reporters, a fact that was reinforced last week when his work on police shootings with a team at The Washington Post was selected as one of the 10 best pieces of journalism over the last decade. The IRP has a long record of scrutinizing the criminal justice system, and that vital work will now benefit enormously from Wes’s wisdom, experience and multitude of storytelling gifts.”

“I could not be more thrilled to have Wesley working with our students and leading investigative storytelling at our school,” said Interim Dean Geeta Anand. “He is a journalist who has great investigative reporting and storytelling abilities, and who is deeply passionate about revealing racial injustice.”

About The Investigative Reporting Program
The Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) is a professional newsroom and teaching institute at the University of California, Berkeley. We are committed to reporting stories that expose injustice and abuse of power while training the next generation of journalists in the highest standards of our craft.

Established in 2006, and now led by David Barstow, the first reporter ever to win four Pulitzer Prizes, the IRP has been a pioneer in the collaborative production of award-winning investigative reporting on multiple platforms. This innovation, now commonplace in the news business, has been recognized with the highest honors in journalism. The program’s work has made it a model for nonprofit journalism based at a college or university that has been replicated around the world.

Help us fearlessly tell stories that no one else is telling, while training the next generation of investigative reporters here.