Investigative and enterprise reporter
I am an investigative and enterprise reporter with a background in audio journalism. Currently, I am pursuing a master’s in investigative journalism at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in Phoenix, AZ.
My strength lies in the intersection of source building, access-driven reporting and public records. I am obsessed with understanding opaque, complex systems in order to find the holes in oversight and accountability. I can efficiently consume a vast amount of information from interviews and records and synthesize it into a sentence about what’s important.
In the summer of 2023, I was a data intern at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where I worked on data-driven stories on housing and labor for the investigations, safety net & local government teams. I was a Global Reporting Centre Investigative Journalism Fellow, which allowed me to pursue an investigation into New Mexico’s child welfare system.
Previously, I worked at Coda Story, a global nonprofit newsroom. I was based between California and Tbilisi, the capitol of Georgia. At Coda, I rose from an audience fellow to a staff reporter and audience lead. In my two and a half years in that newsroom, I reported and voiced a 40-minute podcast episode, produced and hosted a weekly podcast and wrote a weekly newsletter on digital authoritarianism. I wrote feature and enterprise stories on surveillance and disinformation. I have reported feature and enterprise stories from Northern Ireland, San Francisco, Florida and North Carolina.
I also have experience in local journalism. When four wildfires broke out across the county in California where I grew up, I joined the local NPR station, KAZU, as a temporary reporter. I led digital coverage of the wildfires and designed web-pages for fire-related content. I wrote scripts for on-air hosts and updated an online blog twice daily. I also reported and produced a feature story for radio and digital on the recover process for people who lost their homes that was picked up as a newscast by NPR National. Along with the KAZU team, I won the National Edward R. Murrow award for our continuing coverage of the fires.
I received my B.A. from Tufts University with a degree in international relations and Russian & Eastern European Studies. I am proficient in Russian.
You can reach me on Twitter at @caitlin_reports or on email at cthompson.reports@gmail.com.