Katrease Stafford

About

Kat Stafford is the Global Race and Justice Editor at Reuters, where she works with text and visuals editors to ensure journalists are pursuing a range of perspectives across the entire global news file, from politics and society to economics and financial markets. She was previously a national investigative writer and global investigations correspondent, focused on race and inequity, at The Associated Press, where she investigated how structural racism fueled inequity across America.​She joined the AP in February 2020 as a national race and ethnicity writer to cover the intersection of race and politics. But two weeks into her new role, COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, transforming her role to focus on covering the pandemic's disparate impact on Black and other communities of color, the racial justice movement and the presidential election. Prior to joining the AP, she was an investigative reporter at the Detroit Free Press. Her reporting there prompted city legislation, policy changes, congressional reviews and federal and state investigations.​Stafford is a 2021-22 University of Michigan Knight-Wallace Fellowship alumni, where she worked on an award-winning project, From Birth to Death, that examined how a lifetime of health disparities impacted generations of Black Americans throughout their lives.​She is the former vice president of the Investigative Reporters and Editors' Board of Directors and the past chair of IRE's Member Services Committee and the deputy chair of the National Association of Black Journalists' Print Task Force.​Stafford has received several awards for her work. She was recently named the recipient of the National Press Club Journalism Institute’s 2023 Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for Investigative Journalism. She was a finalist for MIT's 2021 McElheny Award science journalism award for an investigative project about lead poisoning and housing demolitions in Detroit. She also was awarded Michigan's Associated Press Media Editors 2019 First Amendment Award.​Stafford was named a 2019 Ida B. Wells Investigative Fellow and received the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2017 Young Journalist of the Year Award from the organization's Detroit chapter. Stafford has been featured on numerous television and radio shows and she regularly leads discussions about race in America. Stafford is also a leading voice on representation and equity and hosts training sessions on equitable sourcings, structural inequities and racism and investigative journalism for organizations and universities across the globe.