I'm a multimedia journalist who has covered local and state government and New Jersey’s criminal justice system for NJ.com and The Star-Ledger newspaper since 2011.
My work moves between old-school muckraking into the machinations of government and politics and experimentation with new media. I like looking at novel technologies and platforms and asking, “How do we do the news on this thing?”
I've written detailed examinations of wrongful conviction cases, investigated dysfunction in the state medical examiner system and prison sexual assault; covered presidential visits and natural disasters; profiled a guy related to the Jersey Devil and published acclaimed poet William Carlos Williams’ FBI file.
My reporting has prompted scrutiny of wrongful convictions and sparked multiple government inquiries into systemic abuse and about a dozen reform laws signed by New Jersey’s governor.
I co-reported the 2017 investigation Death & Dysfunction, which won the Tim O'Brien Award for public records reporting by the New Jersey Society of Professional Journalists and spurred major changes to how the state investigates suspicious deaths.
In 2018, I was part of a team of reporters that developed The Force Report, an unprecedented examination of law enforcement practices that led to an overhaul of how the state monitors the use of force by police. The project was awarded the national Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Freedom of Information Medal and the Online News Association’s James L. Knight Foundation award for Public Service.
Our investigation inspired real reforms, prompting the state attorney general to create a statewide reporting portal modeled after our database.
In 2022, my colleagues and I received the New Jersey Press Association’s First Amendment award for exposing a hush-money settlement and publishing secret recordings of a mayor and police leaders using racial slurs.
In 2024, we received First Place in Breaking News from the New Jersey chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for our coverage of the federal corruption trial of U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, where I schlepped by bus to New York to file dispatches for the newspaper — and on TikTok.
Currently, I’m a senior reporter on the news desk, where I report and occasionally edit investigations and features. Recently, I’ve been embedded with NJ.com’s video team, producing reported social videos for Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and wherever the hell else we’re posting news videos this week.
We’re doing something right. In 2024, our team was a finalist for a Webby Award and, separately, I won the Roy Peter Clark Prize for Excellence in Short Writing by the national Poynter Journalism Prizes for — and I am not making this up — a 90-second TikTok about a tax dispute at the mall.
I graduated with a degree in journalism and anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I briefly flirted with the idea of becoming an archaeologist to do a different kind of digging.
Before coming back to my home state of New Jersey, I covered local news and state politics at MassLive.com. I now live in northern New Jersey with my wife, Rosie, a documentary film and television editor whom I aspire to work for one day, if she’ll hire me.