WaPo announces plans to increase investigative journalism staff

The Washington Post announced Thursday that it would hire nearly a dozen investigative journalists to supplement existing teams and expand the Post’s existing investigations unit.

In a press release, the Post’s editors said the expansion would include five additions to the Post’s investigative unit and five other investigative journalists to other beats in the newsroom, including foreign policy and climate change.

{mosads}“The Post has a long and distinguished history of groundbreaking investigative journalism,” said executive editor Martin Baron in the press release.

“This expansion is very much in that tradition, and it accentuates one of our newsroom’s greatest assets,” he continued. “Our goal is to further strengthen an already robust Investigative Unit and to continue distributing investigative firepower throughout the newsroom.”

The move comes following a similar expansion of the Post’s investigative unit in early 2017, according to the blog post, which resulted in a Pulitzer Prize for work the team did later that year exposing sexual assault allegations against Roy Moore, a Senate candidate from Alabama.

The newspaper joined earlier this year with longtime competitor The New York Times when editors at the two papers denounced a move by the Trump administration to seek the extradition and prosecution of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, under the controversial Espionage Act.

Baron cited the Post’s work in uncovering the Pentagon Papers at the time as a reason why journalists should support Assange, who is accused of publishing classified documents leaked by a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst, Chelsea Manning.

“Dating as far back as the Pentagon Papers case and beyond, journalists have been receiving and reporting on information that the government deemed classified. Wrongdoing and abuse of power were exposed,” Baron said in May.

“With the new indictment of Julian Assange, the government is advancing a legal argument that places such important work in jeopardy and undermines the very purpose of the First Amendment,” he added.