Ziva Branstetter

About

Since 2022, I've led a team of national investigative reporters at ProPublica focused on exposing wrongdoing, holding people and institutions responsible for it accountable and creating lasting impact. My current project is our award-winning “Life of the Mother” investigation into the impact of state abortion bans. Our investigation uncovered the deaths of five pregnant women who couldn’t access emergency reproductive care. Investigations I've edited and supervised during my career have won national awards including the 2025 Worth Bingham Prize, three George Polk Awards, an American Society of Magazine Editors award, two Scripps Howard awards and two Overseas Press Club awards. From 2018 to March 2022, I supervised a team of reporters focused on corporate accountability at The Washington Post. I was the lead editor on The Post's Pandora Papers project, which prompted new laws and won numerous international and national journalism awards. I also led investigations into President Trump's business empire, cocoa companies' use of child labor in West Africa, companies whose products killed and maimed children and the pandemic's impact on nursing home residents.I was previously a senior editor at Reveal and co-founder of The Frontier, an investigative newsroom in Oklahoma. I spent two decades as a reporter and editor at the Tulsa World, where my coverage of Oklahoma's flawed death penalty system was named a 2015 Pulitzer Prize finalist in local reporting.Investigations I've led have resulted in changes in federal, state and municipal laws, exonerated wrongfully convicted people and spurred indictments and resignations of corrupt officials. I've also served three terms on the board of Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. The best way to contact me is to via email: zbranstetter@gmail.com