Ken Armstrong

About

I’m a reporter and editor at Bloomberg, where I'm on the investigations team. I've worked throughout the country, in newsrooms big and small. In my career I've won or shared in four Pulitzer Prizes. On five other occasions I was a Pulitzer finalist. At ProPublica, I wrote, with Raquel Rutledge, "The Landlord & the Tenant," winner of the 2023 National Magazine Award for feature writing. With Nashville Public Radio's Meribah Knight, I reported on a county in Tennessee that illegally jailed hundreds of children. That story became the subject of "The Kids of Rutherford County," a 2023 podcast produced by Serial. My reporting, with Christian Sheckler, on the criminal justice system in Elkhart, Indiana, led to the police chief’s resignation and to two officers being convicted of felony civil rights charges. At The Marshall Project, I won the 2016 Pulitzer for explanatory reporting for "An Unbelievable Story of Rape," written with T. Christian Miller. Our work became an eight-part Netflix series, "Unbelievable," and a "This American Life" episode, both of which won Peabody Awards. I earlier worked at The Seattle Times, where I won the 2012 Pulitzer for investigative reporting with Michael Berens and shared in two staff Pulitzers for breaking news. Prior stops included the Chicago Tribune and newspapers in Virginia, Alaska, California and Idaho. My first job was at the Valley Courier in Alamosa, Colorado, where I was paid $5 an hour to cover sports and courts. I do stories with an investigative spine and a narrative twist. If I’m lucky, the work makes a difference. In Chicago, Steve Mills and I wrote an exposé that helped prompt the Illinois governor to halt executions and commute 167 death sentences, the largest blanket clemency in capital punishment's modern era. In 2009 I received the John Chancellor Award from Columbia for lifetime achievement. Other honors: six-time winner of the Investigative Reporters and Editors award; five George Polk awards; Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting; Worth Bingham Prize; and the Michael Kelly Award for the fearless pursuit and expression of truth. In recent years I’ve taken up books. “Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity,” written with Nick Perry, won the 2011 Edgar Allan Poe Award for non-fiction.

 "Unbelievable," written with T. Christian Miller, was published by Crown and won a 2019 Pacific Northwest Book Award. Both books were a New York Times Editors' Choice. I’ve been the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton and a Nieman Fellow at Harvard.
 Story ideas welcome.