Ken Armstrong

Ken Armstrong went to law school, dropped out, went into the Peace Corps, dropped out, then fell into journalism, which long welcomed dropouts. He spent 25 years at newspapers big and small, the smallest being the Alamosa, Colorado, Valley Courier, where he covered sports and courts (best beat ever). At the Chicago Tribune he dug into hundreds of capital cases, an investigation that helped prompt the Illinois governor to halt executions and empty death row. At the Seattle Times he dug up hundreds of illegally sealed court files. At the Twin Falls, Idaho, Times-News, he wrote about a woman who mooned the police and said she’d do it again.

Armstrong left newspapers for nonprofit newsrooms (The Marshall Project, ProPublica), so he could try new things—and, you know, write longer. He partnered with T. Christian Miller on the Pulitzer Prize-winning “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” then helped turn the story into a “This American Life” episode, a book and an eight-part Netflix drama, “Unbelievable.” The radio episode and Netflix series both won Peabody Awards.

He has won Pulitzer Prizes for investigative reporting and explanatory reporting, and shared in two staff Pulitzers for breaking news. With Raquel Rutledge he wrote “The Landlord & the Tenant,” which won the National Magazine Award for feature writing. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Paris Review, and on Serial, among other places. He has co-authored two books. His first, with Nick Perry, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for nonfiction. He has been a Nieman fellow at Harvard and the McGraw professor of writing at Princeton. Purdue, his alma mater, gave him an honorary doctorate, either forgiving or forgetting all the classes he blew off. Columbia gave him the John Chancellor Award for lifetime achievement—the profession’s polite way of calling you grizzled.

He lives in Seattle and now works for Bloomberg News as an editor and reporter on its global investigations team. If you’ve got a story tip, please hit him up.