Award-winning reporter Brendan McCarthy has been named the Managing Editor of the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, a newly-established subsidiary of Louisville Public Media (LPM), it was announced today. McCarthy, who is currently an investigative reporter at WWL-TV (CBS) in New Orleans, will be responsible for all editorial content, production, and distribution of high-impact investigative journalism.
A 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, McCarthy has extensive experience as an investigative reporter, having written for the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. His investigations have covered such topics as government waste and corruption, human trafficking, civil rights violations and police abuses. McCarthy has received a number of accolades during his career including the Mike Berger Award from Columbia University and the George Polk Award for investigative reporting.
“I’m delighted that we have been able to attract someone of Brendan’s caliber to lead this important new project,” said Donovan Reynolds, President and General Manager of LPM. “He is a fearless journalist whose work has had a powerful impact: his reporting has put important people in jail, led to resignations, indictments and widespread reforms that made his city safer.”
McCarthy’s most recent investigation was a television series that exposed a system of human trafficking from dirt-floor shacks in the Philippines to the oilfields off the coast of Louisiana. He also was co-author of a series, “Law & Disorder,” which revealed rampant police abuses, shootings and cover-ups in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and led to indictments of several officers involved. Other stories have prompted resignations from a deputy mayor and pushed people in power to resign. Also, he helped expose U. S. Senator David Vitter’s affair with a prostitute.
His eight-part narrative series on an unsolved murder of a local teen was named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting in 2009.
"It's no secret that newsrooms everywhere are cutting back, which is why this opportunity to build a unique, investigative newsroom in Louisville is so appealing," McCarthy said. "I look forward to working with the fine folks at Louisville Public Media and producing more hard-hitting journalism of great impact.”
McCarthy will begin his work in Louisville on June 17th.
About the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting
Louisville Public Media, which operates the city’s three public radio stations, secured funding to establish the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting in February. According to LPM, the mission of the center will be to produce journalism in the public interest, by seeking protection for society’s most vulnerable citizens; to assist in exposing wrongdoing by government officials as well as those in the private sector, while also endeavoring to increase the transparency of their actions; and to aid in the search for solutions to the community’s most pressing environmental, educational, judicial, political and economic problems.