ProPublica announced on Wednesday that Tina Griego and Tracy Jan will join its staff as senior editors working with the Local Reporting Network. Griego will launch the network’s sustainability desk, a new program to support the work of former partner newsrooms and reporters; she starts on Jan. 14. Jan will work with newsrooms on sustained LRN investigative projects; she starts on Jan. 27.

“I am thrilled to welcome these two amazing editors to the Local Reporting Network editing team,” said Sarah Blustain, assistant managing editor at ProPublica. “Their energy, sharp investigative insights, and commitment to local journalism will be invaluable to both ProPublica and our newsroom collaborators around the country.”

Griego joins ProPublica as a senior editor on the newly launched sustainability desk. Griego comes from the Colorado News Collaborative (COLab), a coalition of more than 180 local news outlets. A co-founder of COLab and, most recently, its managing editor, Griego led an unprecedented collaboration of 35 local news organizations working on 2024 election coverage.

At COLab, Griego was the top-line editor and project manager of multinewsroom projects, including stories that revealed Colorado’s lack of support for students with substantial behavioral health needs, examined the impact of medical debt, and investigated police shootings in rural Colorado.

Griego also helped lead efforts by Black, Latino, Indigenous and Asian American and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community members and journalists to improve local news coverage of these groups. As a reporter and editor, she investigated the causes of the soaring Latino dropout rate at one Denver high school; the government’s creation of Colorado poorest ZIP code with its placement of of public housing; the state’s past failure to document and regulate the underground network of oil and gas infrastructure; and the Army Corps of Engineers’ long-ago decision to build a dam in New Mexico that it knew would devastate tribal farmland downstream. These projects have won national recognition, including the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism’s Tobenkin Memorial Award for “outstanding achievements in reporting on racial or religious hatred, intolerance or discrimination in the U.S.” and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists Frank del Olmo Print Journalist of the Year Award.

A native New Mexican, Griego began her work as a reporter with the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the Los Angeles Times. She was among the team of reporters who received the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news coverage of the Los Angeles uprisings after the Rodney King beating. She spent most of her career in Colorado as a project reporter and then columnist for the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post. Griego is a member of the Scripps Howard Hall of Fame for her reported columns, and her work included a yearlong series on the impact of immigration, legal and illegal, on one Denver block. In a brief experiment with East Coast-living, she joined The Washington Post, where she married public policy reporting with narrative for its Storyline vertical.

“I’ve spent most of my career in local news. My work at COLab has been dedicated to leveraging the strength of local newsrooms to report on stories that they are uniquely positioned to tell and that are critical to their communities,” Griego said. “Sometimes they just need support to do that. I am thrilled to be joining ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network and a team that understands both the potential and the need. I’m excited by the opportunity to build upon the LRN’s proven record of helping local newsrooms report high-impact, often jaw-dropping, stories that hold power to account, challenge the status quo and change lives.”

Jan joins ProPublica from The Washington Post, where she was a deputy health and science editor, leading coverage of medical misinformation, public health and other health accountability stories. Jan was an editor on the paper’s 2023 team series, “Dying Early: America’s Life Expectancy Crisis,” which won the Online News Association's Investigative Data Journalism Award and the National Headliner First Place Award for News Series in Daily Newspapers. One story she worked on illustrated how decisions made years ago by politicians are shaving years off American lives. Another story she led showed how weak federal nutrition rules and industry power paved the way for ultra-processed products, such as Lunchables, to appear on school lunch trays. Jan also edited investigations into doctors who spread medical misinformation during the coronavirus pandemic; the Biden administration’s plodding response to the mpox emergency; a deadly listeria outbreak at a Boar’s Head plant; and more recently, financial ties between Mehmet Oz's media business and companies whose fortunes he would have a hand in influencing if confirmed to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Jan joined the Post in December 2016 as a reporter to launch a beat on the intersection of race and the economy. Through investigative reporting and explanatory narratives that wove data with rich storytelling, she covered this beat for more than five years, during which her work was regularly recognized by the National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Awards in investigative reporting, business reporting and feature writing. Her coverage included racial disparities in disaster funding and systemic racism in the “George Floyd’s America” series, which won a 2021 Polk Award. And she shut down a Hollywood manager three days after revealing how he had sexually preyed on Black actresses for decades.

Before her time at the Post, Jan was a Washington-based political reporter for The Boston Globe. During her 12 years at the Globe, Jan also wrote about health and science policy, higher education, and Boston public schools. She started her career as a crime and courts reporter at the Oregonian and was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, as well as a Fulbright Fellow in Taiwan. She has reported from Taipei, Beijing, Tibet and along the Yangtze River. Jan serves as journalism director on The Stanford Daily Publishing Corporation, the board for the student-run newspaper.

“I can’t wait to partner with well-sourced journalists from news outlets in all pockets of this country to uncover systemic problems people in power want to keep hidden,” Jan said. “There is nothing more important than ProPublica’s mission of investigative reporting that holds elected officials, business leaders and other decision-makers to account — work that has the potential to change lives and communities.”