The Center for Investigative Reporting

David Weir, Dan Noyes, and Lowell Bergman founded The Center for Investigative Reporting in 1977.[5][6][7][8] Its offices were located in downtown Oakland, California.[5] This was the first nonprofit news organization in the United States to be focused on investigative reporting.[3] The Center's first large investigation exposed the criminal activity of the Black Panther Party. The organization revisited this subject in 2012.[5]

In 1982, reporters from the Center worked with Mother Jones magazine to report testing fraud in consumer products.[9] The investigation won several awards, including Sigma Delta Chi and Investigative Reporters and Editors awards.[5]

CIR began producing television documentaries in 1980. It has since produced more than 30 documentaries for Frontline and Frontline/World, dozens of reports for other television outlets, and three independent feature documentaries. ABC’s 20/20 and CBS’s 60 Minutes have featured reporting from CIR. Major investigations in the 1980s resulted in reporting of the toxicity of ordinary consumer products, an exposé of nuclear accidents in the world's navies, and coverage of questionable tactics by the FBI during the administration of President Ronald Reagan.[5]

In 1990, CIR produced its first independent TV documentary, Global Dumping Ground, reported by Bill Moyers on PBS’s Frontline. The film spurred federal investigations and was rebroadcast in at least 18 nations.[5]

In 1992, CIR produced The Best Campaign Money Can Buy for Frontline, an investigation of the top funders of that year's presidential campaign. It featured correspondent Robert Krulwich, and was produced by Stephen Talbot with reporters Eve Pell and Dan Noyes. The documentary won a DuPont/Columbia Journalism Award.[10]

Other notable CIR reports included an investigation of General Motors, one on the rise of conservative media figure Rush Limbaugh and another on Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia), as well as a study of education and race in an urban high school, School Colors. An investigation for the New York Daily News and FOX's Front Page revealed lethal dangers in a common diet drug.[5]

In 2005, the Center's investigations into wiretapping and data mining stimulated Congressional hearings on privacy issues.[5] The Center also exposed the forensic practices of the FBI that resulted in wrongful convictions and imprisonments.[11]

Robert J. Rosenthal became executive director of the Center in 2007.[5] He had more than thirty years of experience as a journalist and editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, and The New York Times.[12] Rosenthal hired Mark Katches as the editorial director of the start-up news organization called California Watch in 2009. Katches would later be named editorial director for all of CIR, a position he held until 2014, when he left to become the editor and vice president of content at The Oregonian, in Portland Oregon.[13]

In 2010, the Center released the documentary film, Dirty Business. It explored problems with the myth of clean coal and the extensive lobbying tactics of the coal industry.

The organization's reports have been published in news outlets around the country and in California including NPR News, PBS Frontline, PBS NEWSHOUR, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, The Sacramento Bee, The Daily Beast, Salon, Al Jazeera English, and American Public Media's Marketplace.

In April 2012, it partnered with Google to host TechRaking, an informal conference that brought together journalists and technologists.[14] In September 2012, the second TechRaking brought together journalists and gamers, at IGN in San Francisco.

CIR announced a partnership with Univision News in 2012 to bring investigative stories to Hispanic households in the United States.[15]

Amy Pyle became Editor in Chief in 2015 after two decades of award-winning journalism. She had worked at The Sacramento Bee, where she was Assistant Managing Editor/Projects and Investigations, and the Los Angeles Times, where she led coverage of the Northridge Earthquake from the newspaper's parking lot of the quake-damaged San Fernando Valley office.

In February 2019, Matt Thompson was announced as the new Editor In Chief. Thompson was formerly the executive editor of The Atlantic. He oversaw major editorial projects and new initiatives, such as the launch of the magazine's podcasting unit, membership strategy, and talent development teams. During his time as deputy editor of TheAtlantic.com, he helped lead the magazine's digital team through three record-breaking years of audience growth. Prior to The Atlantic, he was director of vertical initiatives for NPR, where he created several broadcast and digital journalism teams, including Code Switch and NPR Ed. He is a former board member of the Center for Public Integrity, where he served for eight years.

In April 2012 CIR merged with The Bay Citizen, a nonprofit, investigative news group based in San Francisco.[16][17]

In 2009, The Center for Investigative Reporting created California Watch, a reporting team dedicated to state-focused stories.[5] Its website launched in 2010.[18] Editorial Director Mark Katches said that the site would act as a watchdog team focusing on government oversight, criminal justice, education, health, and the environment.[19] In 2010, the Online News Association honored California Watch with a general excellence award.[5] In 2012, California Watch won the George Polk Award for its series on Medicare billing fraud. The authors of the series were Christina Jewett, Lance Williams and Stephen Doig. California Watch also was a Pulitzer finalist for its On Shaky Ground series by Corey G. Johnson, Erica Perez, Kendall Taggart and Agustin Armendariz. The series detailed flaws in state oversight of seismic safety at K-12 schools. The On Shaky Ground reporting team won a Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for Public Service. California Watch won a second Polk award in 2012, this time for Ryan Gabrielson's series about the failures of a unique police force to solve crimes committed against the developmentally disabled living in state board-and-care hospitals. The series also won an Online Journalism Award from the Online News Association.

In August 2012, The Center for Investigative Reporting created "The I Files" channel on YouTube.[20] The Knight Foundation provided an $800,000 grant to make the channel possible.[21] The channel, renamed as Reveal, presents investigative videos produced by CIR and from a variety of news outlets, including The New York Times, BBC, Al Jazeera English, ABC News, National Public Radio, and member organizations of the Investigative News Network.[22]

Reveal uses multiple digital platforms to publish its information from its website. The radio program, which the website is named after, airs on 470 radio stations in the Public Radio Exchange network, and the show is also available in podcast form.[23] The main website for Reveal contains links to each podcast episode, video, and multimedia story shared by the outlet. Each video is also available on their YouTube channel, and all the podcasts can be subscribed to via the usual podcast outlets. Reveal is active on social media including Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. The outlet also has a blog, Dig, where the staff posts about internal updates and how they created data-driven stories.

All of CIR's digital reporting is now available on Reveal's website where the CIR shares podcasts, videos, and many data-driven investigative projects.[3]