Charles ‘Chuck’ Lewis is a professor of journalism and the founding executive editor of the new Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication, in Washington, D.C. He is also a bestselling author and has founded or co-founded a total of four non-profit enterprises in Washington, including the Center for Public Integrity.
A national investigative journalist since 1977, he left a successful career at ABC News and the CBS News programme 60 Minutes to begin the Center for Public Integrity from his home. Under his leadership, the Center published roughly 300 investigative reports, including 14 books, from 1989 through 2004, and has been honoured more than 30 times by national journalism organisations.
In 1997, he began the Center’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the world’s first working network of 100 premier reporters in 50 countries producing content across borders. And that made www.publicintegrity.org the “first global website devoted to international exposés.”
In 2005, Lewis co-founded Global Integrity, an independent, non-profit organisation utilising journalists and social scientists to track governance and corruption trends around the world. From 2005 through 2008, he served as founding president of the Fund for Independence in Journalism in Washington, an endowment and legal defence support organisation for the Center for Public Integrity. He has been a consultant on access to information issues to the Carter Center in Atlanta, a Ferris Professor at Princeton University, and a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University.
At the 2009 summer school, Chuck gave talks about power, the news media and the public’s right to know: In Search of Truth and about the Emerging New Investigative Journalism Ecosystem.