Ian Urbina

As a student at St Albans[7] and at Georgetown, Urbina was an accomplished long-distance runner.[8][9][10] His father, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, who was also a highly accomplished collegiate runner, was the first Latino on the federal bench in DC.[11][12][13][14]

Ian Urbina has a degree in history from Georgetown University. Before joining The New York Times in 2003, Urbina was in a doctoral program in history and anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he specialized on Cuba.[15] As a Fulbright scholar, he did his doctoral dissertation research in Havana.[16]

Based at a think tank in Washington DC called The Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP),[17] he spent two years writing about the Middle East[18] and published in The International Herald Tribune, Harper's Magazine, The Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor. He is a regular contributor to NPR[19] and C-SPAN.[20] In 2016, National Geographic designated Urbina as one of its resident Nat Geo Explorers and in 2020 he was awarded a National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship to make a podcast about The Outlaw Ocean Music Project and the use of music to convert and amplify journalism.[21] In 2017, he became a Resident Fellow at The Safina Center, a research and creative collective focused on environmental conservation, which was founded by the naturalist writer and scholar, Dr. Carl Safina.[22] In 2019, he was brought on staff as an investigator for the United Nations in affiliation with the UN's World Maritime University in Malmö, Sweden. In 2019, Urbina also founded a non-profit organization[23] called The Outlaw Ocean Project, dedicated to producing journalism about the environmental, human rights and labor concerns that exist offshore around the world.

Urbina was initially a reporter on the Times' Metro desk. In 2005, Urbina moved to the Times' national desk to become its Mid-Atlantic Bureau chief, where he covered West Virginia coal mining disasters, the Gulf oil spill, the Virginia Tech shootings and other breaking stories. He has also written extensively on criminal justice issues, including stories about the use of prisoners for pharmaceutical experiments,[24] immigrant detainees working as unpaid workers,[25][26] solitary confinement in immigration detention facilities,[27] and the dependence of the U.S. Defense Department on prison labor.[28] He became a senior investigative reporter for the National Desk in 2010, where he wrote a series in 2011, "Drilling Down", about the oil and gas industry and fracking.[29][30][31]

On worker safety, in 2013, he wrote a story about longterm exposure to hazardous chemicals and the federal agency, O.S.H.A., which is responsible for protecting against these workplace threats.[32] For the New York Times Magazine, he wrote in 2014, a piece called "The Secret Life of Passwords" about the anecdotes and emotions hidden in everyday web-users' "secure" passwords.[33]

In 2015, Urbina wrote a series called "The Outlaw Ocean," about lawlessness on the high seas.[34][35][36][37] To report the stories, Urbina traveled through Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, much of that time spent on fishing ships, chronicling a diversity of crimes offshore, including the killing of stowaways, sea slavery, intentional dumping, illegal fishing, the stealing of ships, gun-running, stranding of crews, and murder with impunity.[38] U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry, has repeatedly cited the reporting as the impetus for a series of policy changes.[39][40][41] John Kerry mentioned The Outlaw Ocean's reporting during a news conference where he explained the U.S. State Department’s decision to give Thailand the lowest grade on human trafficking.[42] This series served as the basis of the 2019 book, The Outlaw Ocean, which has since been published in various countries and languages.

In 2019, Urbina created Synesthesia Media, which specializes in mixing mediums. In its first project, the firm functioned as a music label and recruited hundreds of musicians from more than 80 countries.[43] As part of The Outlaw Ocean Music Project,[44] these artists ranged in genre from classical and ambient to electronic and hip hop.[45] Each musician made their own album, inspired by the book and using field recordings that Urbina collected while reporting the book. The project's stated goal is to serve as an experiment in translation, converting journalism into music, while also disseminating the reporting more broadly, especially to younger demographics globally. The project has been widely reviewed by NPR, Billboard magazine, GQ, San Francisco Classical Voice, The Pulitzer Center and elsewhere.[46][47]

Four movie projects have emerged from Urbina's investigations. In interviews, Matt Damon and John Krasinski have said that their 2012 film Promised Land was partly inspired by the Times' investigative series, "Drilling Down".[48]

In 2010, Urbina wrote a profile for Vanity Fair on Sam Childers, a former Hell's Angel and gun runner, turned born-again Christian preacher, who joined the guerrilla fighters in South Sudan. Urbina traveled with Childers, after he was ostensibly hired to kill a brutal warlord named Joseph Kony, leader of a group called the Lord's Resistance Army. In 2011, Childers' life story became the basis of a movie called Machine Gun Preacher, starring Gerard Butler.[49] Also, in 2011, Urbina's reporting was part of a story optioned for the film, Deepwater Horizon with Mark Wahlberg.[50]

In 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio, Netflix and Kevin Misher bought the scripted and non-scripted rights for The Outlaw Ocean book to produce a documentary series about the reporting as well as a non-scripted series based on Urbina's reporting.[51]

A 2007 Times investigation by Urbina about so-called "mag crews" — traveling groups of teenagers, many of them runaways or from broken homes, who sell magazine subscriptions — was optioned for a 2016 movie, American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold and starring Shia LaBeouf.[52][53]

• In 2001, Urbina was awarded a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to be based for a year in Havana, Cuba on behalf of The University of Chicago for anthropology and history doctoral research.[54]
• In 2006, Urbina was a member of the team of reporters that wrote a series about diabetes, which received a public service award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ New York City chapter and a Society of Silurians award for science health reporting. The series was a finalist[55] for the Pulitzer Prize.
• In 2008, Urbina was also a member of the team of reporters that broke the story about then-New York Governor, Eliot Spitzer and his use of prostitutes, a series of stories for which the Times won a Pulitzer in 2009.
• In 2010, Urbina wrote a series called, "Running in the Shadows" which focused on the sexual trafficking of minors and the growing number of young runaways in the United States. This series received the New York Press Club’s award for feature reporting.
• In 2011, Urbina delivered the annual Kops Freedom of the Press lecture at Cornell University titled, "Investigating the Natural Gas Drilling Boom" (video).[56] "Drilling Down" also received a Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW), "Best in Business" award.
• In 2014, his story about OSHA and worker exposure to hazardous chemicals was a finalist in the Explanatory category for the Gerald Loeb Award. He was also on the Times team covering the death of thousands of garment workers in Bangladesh that was also a finalist for a Loeb Award that year in the international reporting category.[57]
• In 2015, Urbina's, "The Secret Life of Passwords" was nominated for an Emmy.[58]
• In 2016, Urbina's series, "The Outlaw Ocean" won various journalism awards, including the George Polk Awards for Foreign Reporting,[59] The Maritime Foundation's Desmond Wettern Media Award for Best Journalistic Contribution,[60][61] The Sigma Delta Chi Award[62] for Foreign Correspondence from the Society of Professional Journalists, The Peter Benchley Ocean Award for Media Excellence,[63] The Best in Business Award for Feature Writing[64] from the Society of Business Editors and Writers, and The Human Rights Press Award Online English Merit Award.[65] The Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA) also awarded the series a prize in the Excellence in Digital News category and an honorable mention in the Human Rights Reporting category.[66] Photos from the series won The National Press Photographers Association's 2016 Award for Best Of Photojournalism Multimedia[67] and The Photojournalism/Documentary Award from Photo District News (PDN).[68] The series' videos won the National Edward R. Murrow Award for News Series.[69] The series was also a finalist for The Scripps Howard Award in Public Service Reporting,[70] The Gerald Loeb Award in International reporting,[71] and The Michael Kelly Award.[72] The series won an honorable mention for TRACE International's Prize for Investigative Reporting for "Maritime 'Repo Men': A last resort for stolen ships,"[73] and won an honorable mention for The Anthony Lewis Prize for Exceptional Rule of Law Journalism, given by the World Justice Project.
• In 2019, The Outlaw Ocean was placed on Amazon’s List of Best Books of 2019[74] and The New York Times Best Seller List for Non-Fiction.[75][76]

• 2019: The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier. Knopf Doubleday, New York 2019, ISBN 978-0451492944.
• 2005: Life's Little Annoyances: True Tales of People Who Just Can't Take It Anymore. Reprint, Henry Holt and Company, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0805083033.

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• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Urbina testifies before Congress