ProPublica announced Thursday that Ginger Thompson will be promoted to managing editor, effective immediately. For the past decade, she has played a key role in our journalism and in shaping our culture — first as a reporter, then as ProPublica’s inaugural chief of correspondents.
Over the past three years, she has established herself as an invaluable member of the senior leadership team, working across the newsroom to advance our efforts to recruit and retain the best journalists in the business. There are numerous firsts in her list of accomplishments. She has overseen the building, from the ground up, of a department that now manages recruitment, onboarding and professional development for both the editorial and business sides of our organization.
In her new role, she will oversee our immigration coverage, our revitalized Washington, D.C., bureau and other key organizational responsibilities. She also will have an expanded role in overseeing our strategic initiatives in audio and video that will broaden the way we tell stories and the audiences we reach.
Thompson co-led the creation of an investigative editor training program that has attracted participants from national and local news organizations around the country. And she has worked closely with our Diversity and Inclusion committees on projects aimed at making ours a fairer and more equitable newsroom.
Thompson joined ProPublica with an extraordinary range of reporting experience. She spent 15 years at The New York Times, where she worked on the investigations team, as a correspondent in Washington and as Mexico City bureau chief. Prior to that she was a Latin America correspondent at the Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun. Soon after she began covering Latin America for the Sun, she and reporting partner Gary Cohn brought to light U.S. support for a secret Honduran military unit that kidnapped, tortured and murdered hundreds of suspected leftists; that reporting was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service.
Her work has won the Maria Moors Cabot Prize, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, an InterAmerican Press Association Award and an Overseas Press Club Award. She was part of a team of national reporters at the Times that was awarded a 2000 Pulitzer Prize for the series “How Race is Lived in America.” She was also part of a team of reporters at ProPublica whose coverage of the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy won numerous other awards, including a Polk Award, a Peabody Award and a Tobenkin Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for public service. In 2019, she was honored with the John Chancellor Award, given each year to a reporter of “courage and integrity” for their cumulative achievements. In 2022, she was named to the Pulitzer Board.
“Ginger Thompson is one of the finest investigative journalists I’ve ever worked with,” said Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor in chief. “She has a remarkable track record for breaking difficult stories, often in dangerous places. She’s been a key member of our leadership team, an innovator who has already made ProPublica a better place. I can’t wait to see what we will do together in this new chapter.”
