James Grimaldi

James V. Grimaldi is executive editor of the National Catholic Reporter, overseeing all aspects of NCR’s editorial content, including breaking, enterprise, and investigative reporting. He joined NCR from The Wall Street Journal, where he was a senior reporter on the investigations desk, writing accountability stories about money, politics, government, charities, lobbying, and campaigns.

Previously, Grimaldi worked for more than a decade at The Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting with two others for the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. He also won the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize and was a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize.

While at The Washington Post, Grimaldi and three colleagues also won the Freedom of Information Medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors for “The Hidden Life of Guns,” a series of stories in 2009 that tracked guns used in crimes to dealers. Grimaldi also was an IRE Freedom of Information Medal finalist a year earlier for coverage of the Smithsonian Institution, which is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

While working for The Orange County Register, he shared the investigative reporting Pulitzer Prize with the staff for reporting about a University of California fertility clinic. As a Seattle Times bureau reporter, he won the Washington Correspondence award from the National Press Club for his coverage of the Microsoft antitrust trial and twice won the club’s Robin Goldstein Award for Washington Regional Reporting.

A graduate of the University of Missouri Journalism School and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Grimaldi was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He is a frequent lecturer on public records laws and investigative reporting in journalism classes at George Washington University, the University of Maryland and American University. Grimaldi served as president and director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, the nation’s leading journalism training organization, and he is a frequent speaker at the group’s conferences, and is on the advisory board of the Fund for Investigative Journalism.