Eric Ferkenhoff

About

Ferkenhoff is a Kansas City-based writer, an editor and a journalism instructor formerly based in the Chicago area and North Carolina. He currently works as an investigative reporter for Lee Enterprises, which owns papers throughout the country. He previously served as part of Newsweek's national investigative team, and before that was an enterprise and investigative reporter for Gannett-USA TODAY Network. Prior to moving to Kansas City, he was Managing Editor/Reporter at one of the leading fact-checking outlets, a writer/editor for a juvenile justice publication and an instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill. From Kansas City, where he worked at a home for at-risk youth, Ferkenhoff moved to Chicago in the early 1990s to pursue reporting at a time when the city was exploding with youth violence and the Chicago Tribune was just wrapping its series on 'Killing Our Children.' Ferkenhoff freelanced for the first several months in the city, then took a job at the City News Bureau, where he learned Chicago, its politics, criminal justice and education systems and its diverse but extremely segregated neighborhoods. In 1997, he joined the Chicago Tribune, where he stayed more than five years - chiefly covering criminal justice and education and the politics that dominate both. While working with ABC News-Chicago, Crain's Chicago Business, The Boston Globe, Time, US News & World Report and The New York Times, Ferkenhoff joined Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 2005. There, he taught and co-taught at the graduate and undergraduate levels, covering classes ranging from intro courses to enterprise, investigative and multimedia. At Medill and UNC, he has taught classes on enterprise and investigative reporting on justice, youth, education and politics. He has also been the editor for two UNC journalism school initiatives focused on building up coverage in a former news desert and fact-checking. In 2012, he started what became The Youth Project to examine youth justice and such feeder issues as race, poverty, education, immigration and health. He recently served as the North Carolina bureau chief for the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange, or JJIE.org, zeroing in on the Raise the Age law in the state and related issues. Ferkenhoff moved to North Carolina in 2016, and his primary areas of expertise are criminal justice, politics and education, though he has covered faith, business, transportation and other beats, as well. He moved back home to cover criminal justice in late 2020.