In recent years, much of the traditional American media, in a drive to cut costs and maintain profits, has slashed the capacity to do investigative journalism. This has happened just as the forces of technology and globalization are combining to make government and powerful private institutions less transparent, and thus, less subject to public scrutiny and oversight.

The Investigative Reporting Workshop, a project of the School of Communication at American University, addresses this fundamental issue for democracy in two important ways:

• By conducting significant investigative journalism projects on a national and international scale.
• By researching and experimenting with new models for creating and delivering investigative projects.

The Workshop was formally approved by the university in the Spring of 2008. We began publishing original projects in the Spring of 2009.