The 20009-10 Carnegie Legal Reporting Fellows

Freelance investigative journalist Gregg Wirth plans to examine the challenges company shareholders face in bringing securities fraud charges against corporations. This issue will be raised in the February 2010 federal district court case SEC v. Bank of America, which Wirth will cover as an integral part of his project. Wirth holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and bachelor’s degrees in English and mass communications-journalism from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, Salon.com, Dollars & Sense, BusinessWeek, Investment Dealers’ Digest, and TheStreet.com. He won the Malcolm Law Award for Investigative Reporting from the Associated Press in 1991 for his series in The Daily Herald about an illegal toxic waste dump in a poor neighborhood.

After spending more than a decade covering courts and criminal justice matters, John Martin intends to look into the murder of a Midwestern priest in 2002. Besides investigating the case, Martin will also explore the phenomena of false confessions and barriers to appeals in the judicial system. Martin has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Delaware. His freelance writing has been published in Hearst newspapers and Bloomberg News outlets. Martin was a staff writer for The Star-Ledger, where he was part of the paper’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning team.  He has also worked for FoxNews.com, and washingtonpost.com.

Trevor Aaronson’s research stems from the aftermath of 9/11. Since the terrorist attack, the FBI has relied on informants from Muslim communities in the War on Terror, even resorting to coercion and intimidation to force their cooperation. Aaronson hopes to create a database of these abuses as part of his project. After graduating from the University of South Florida with a bachelor’s degree in literature, Aaronson is currently working on his MBA at the University of Memphis. Besides serving as an editorial consultant to various companies, he has had a fair share of experience as an investigative reporter at The Commercial Appeal, Village Voice Media, and Creative Loafing Media. This award-winning journalist has been honored by the National Association of Black Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists, among others.

Steve Miller is writing a book titled Girl, Wanted: The Escape of Sarah Pender, which documents the case of a female fugitive who escaped from a maximum security prison in Indiana last summer. Miller’s investigation of the case includes conducting an in-depth examination of the management system at the Indiana Department of Correction. A Pulitzer Prize nominee, Miller has garnered 16 years of newspaper, online, and magazine journalism experience by working for a number of national and business publications, including The Washington Times, The Dallas Morning News, CBS Interactive, People, and Brandweek.

The Carnegie/Newhouse School Legal Reporting Fellowships program awards four fellowships per year of up to $3,000 each, plus other benefits, for freelance journalists examining some aspect of the American legal system. It also awards Newhouse journalism students positions as research assistants, so that the students can gain practical knowledge of reporting on the law while providing additional support to the journalists in the fellowship program.

The Carnegie/Newhouse School Legal Reporting Fellowships are part of the Newhouse School’s Carnegie Legal Reporting Program. Supported by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and its Carnegie Journalism Initiative, the program provides a number of services designed to teach students about the workings of the American legal system and the role of the news media in covering the law. Additional funding for the first year's fellowships was provided by Syracuse University’s Institute for the Study of the Judiciary, Politics, and the Media.