Gary Cohn (journalist)
Gary Cohn (born March 9, 1952[1]) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and adjunct professor at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
This article is about the journalist. For others, see Gary Cohn (disambiguation).
Gary Cohn
March 9, 1952
B.A., State University of New York, Buffalo
Freelance Journalist
1998 Pulitzer Prize Winner
He won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting,[2] with Will Englund, while at The Baltimore Sun, and has been a Pulitzer finalist on two other occasions.[3][4] Cohen has won numerous additional journalism awards, including the 1997 George Polk Award, and the Investigative Reporting & Editors (IRE) gold medal.[5][6]
Education and background[edit]
Cohn is a native of Brooklyn, New York.[1] He graduated summa cum laude from the State University of New York at Buffalo, with a BA in psychology and political science and studied law, for a year, at University of California, Berkeley.[1]
He was Atwood Professor of Journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage from 2001 to 2003 and currently teaches, as an adjunct professor, in Journalism, at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Journalism.[7][8]
In October 2020, Cohn was awarded a McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, with Eric Pape, a fellow professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism. The prize was awarded so they could "look into the fast-growing anti-vaccine movement and its implications for people and science in the age of Covid-19."[9]
Career[edit]
Cohn has reported for the Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Los Angeles Times, Lexington Herald-Leader, Wall Street Journal, and for the columnist Jack Anderson in Washington.[8] He has worked as a freelance journalist since 2010, (LinkedIn profile) and his stories have appeared in numerous publications and online sites such as the Huffington Post, Salon, Capital & Main, and Juvenile Justice Information Exchange.[10][11][12]
in 1975, after a year of law school at the University of California, Cohn went to work as an investigator at the Southern Research Council.[1] He also began working as a reporter for the columnist, Jack Anderson, who had been a target for assassination by senior staff of Richard Nixon administration.[1][13] Cohn left in 1980 to work as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and the Lexington Herald-Leader specializing in investigative reporting.[1]
Cohn worked for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 1986–1993 before leaving to work under John Carroll of the Baltimore Sun, at a time when the Inquirer was struggling to keep from losing its staff.[1][14] While at the Sun, Cohn and fellow journalist, Will Englund, won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting under Carroll, having been given 18 months to travel and investigate the environmental dangers and hazardous conditions that shipbreakers faced in the mostly unregulated industry.[2][15]
Cohn worked under Carroll again, from 2003–2007, at the Los Angeles Times, as an investigative reporter.[16] He reported for a short time, in sports, before leaving to work as a Senior Writer for Bloomberg Markets, (2007-2008) where he won the Bartlett and Steele award with Darrell Preston.[17][18][19]
Cohn is also a contributor to Mesothelioma.com, in an effort to bring attention to the asbestos industry concerning asbestos related illnesses.[20]
Cohn has won more than 30 prizes for journalism.[1] Some of his awards are listed below.