Tuesday, June 25, 2019
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m.
Knox Hall 509, 606 West 122nd Street
Ginger Thompson is a senior reporter at ProPublica. A Pulitzer Prize winner and finalist for the National Magazine Award, she previously spent 15 years at The New York Times, including time as a Washington correspondent and as an investigative reporter whose stories revealed Washington’s secret, sometimes tragic, role in Mexico’s fight against drug traffickers. Thompson served as the Mexico City Bureau Chief for both The Times and The Baltimore Sun, and for her work in the region, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer’s Gold Medal for Public Service and the winner of the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, an InterAmerican Press Association Award, and an Overseas Press Club Award.
Prior to going to Mexico City for The Times, Thompson was part of a team of national reporters there that was awarded a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for the series “How Race is Lived in America.”
Since joining ProPublica, Thompson’s work has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times and National Geographic. In 2018, her story about the Drug Enforcement Administration’s role in a Mexican massacre was nominated for a National Magazine Award. This year, her coverage of the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policies won the Polk and Peabody awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Thompson graduated from Purdue University, where she was managing editor of the campus newspaper, The Exponent. She earned a Master of Public Policy from George Washington University, with a focus on human rights law.
This event is part of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research’s 2019 Summer Institute, “From the Margins to the Center: Narrating the Politics of Our Time,” co-sponsored by Columbia Journalism School and The American Assembly.