About Us

New Orleans Lens’ strength lies in a highly qualified editorial and research staff, as well as a collaborative network of affiliated organizations including the Center for Public Integrity, Project on Government Oversight,and the emerging national Investigative News Network.

For her work exposing widespread misuse of city recovery funds, reporter Karen Gadbois was recently recognized by the Peabody Award committee and Investigative Reporters and Editors. Editor Jed Horne was awarded a Pulitzer Prize as part of the Times-Picayune team that covered Katrina and the recovery. He is the author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City (Random House, 2006, 2008), which was declared “the best of the Katrina books” on National Public Radio. Managing Editor Steve Beatty is a veteran investigative reporter and editor. He worked as an editor for The Times-Picayune for 15 years, leaving New Orleans just before Katrina to take a position as an editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and quickly rose through the ranks to be an editor of the newspaper’s watchdog investigative team. He returned to New Orleans in May of 2009. Before joining The Lens, Beatty worked as an investigative reporter for The Pelican Institute, a public policy think tank. New Orleans City Business veteran and Next American City contributing writer Ariella Cohen reports on real estate, urban planning and land-use issues. Brentin Mock is a specialist in environmental justice and public policy issues. He has been a regular contributor to Good magazine and The American Prospect, as well as to African-American websites operated by The Washington Post and MSNBC.  Eli Ackerman is a veteran New Orleans blogger, most recently of the http://wecouldbefamous.blogspot.com/.

Joint investigations done through an exclusive partnership between WVUE Fox 8 TV, fox8live.com and thelensnola.org will appear online and on channel eight.

The Lens is supported in part by a grant from The Open Society Institute. The site has also received support from The Zeitoun Foundation, a New Orleans-based nonprofit created by New York Times best-selling author Dave Eggers to distribute proceeds from his recent book, Zeitoun, about a family of storm survivors who are wrongly caught up in federal anti-terrorism efforts. Transforma Projects provides support for a program we will conduct to train citizen journalists.

Read about us in Gambit, NOLA.COM and on the WVUE Fox 8 website.