Annie Waldman

Reporter

Photo of Annie Waldman

Annie Waldman is a reporter at ProPublica covering health care. A piece she published with The New York Times on a New Jersey student debt agency prompted a new law and several new bills, aimed at increasing consumer protections for student borrowers and their families. Following her reporting on the largest accreditor of for-profit colleges, the U.S. Department of Education stripped the agency of its powers. Her reporting with Erica Green of The New York Times led to a federal civil rights investigation of discrimination against Native American students on a reservation in Montana.

In 2018, she contributed to the “Lost Mothers” series, which investigated the high rate of maternal mortality in the United States. This series won the 2018 Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting, received a George Polk Award, a Peabody and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for explanatory reporting. Following her reporting on maternal mortality in New York, the city launched a $12.8 million initiative to reduce maternal deaths and complications among women of color.

She graduated with honors from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she was the recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship and the Brown Institute Computational Journalism Award. Her stories have been published in The New York Times, the Atlantic, Vice, BBC News, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Consumer Reports.

She has been a finalist twice and won two awards from the Education Writers Association for her education reporting. She has won an award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers and was a finalist for the Loeb Awards for her reporting with Paul Kiel and Al Shaw on the racial disparity of wage garnishment.

Prior to joining ProPublica, she was a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Israel, where she reported on the plight of refugees from Darfur and Eritrea. She was also a recipient of a residency at Cité International des Arts in Paris, France. She had a documentary film in the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, on the lives of homeless high school students after Hurricane Katrina, which was later broadcast nationally on PBS. She produced "Phantom Cowboys," a documentary about male adolescence in small industry towns, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018.

Her PGP Key ID is E8F41874.

She Made Every Effort to Avoid COVID-19 While Pregnant. Not a Single Thing Went According to Plan.

As coronavirus spread through the nursing home where Molly Baldwin is a social worker, management wouldn’t let her work remotely. That forced her to choose between staying safe while in her third trimester and getting her paycheck.

How New York City’s Emergency Ventilator Stockpile Ended Up on the Auction Block

A 2006 pandemic plan warned that New York City could be short as many as 9,500 ventilators. But the city only acquired a few hundred, which were ultimately scrapped because it couldn’t afford to maintain them.

Life on a Block With an Emergency Morgue Truck: “We Hear the Hum of the Refrigerator Going All Night Long”

On a block in Brooklyn sits a refrigerated morgue truck. Marc Kozlow walks his dog, Hank, past it. He hears the refrigerator at night. He watches the bodies being loaded and unloaded. “Prepare for this,” he told ProPublica.

Your Neighborhood Might Be a Coronavirus Hot Spot, but New York City Refuses to Release the Data

Some local governments have published where coronavirus cases appear, down to the neighborhood level. New York City has made public only county-by-county data, making it difficult to see which communities are being hardest hit.

The Trump Administration Drove Him Back to China, Where He Invented a Fast Coronavirus Test

A federal crackdown on professors’ undisclosed outside activities is achieving what China has long struggled to do: spur Chinese scientists to return home. In this crisis, it’s costing the U.S. intellectual firepower.

Are Hospitals Near Me Ready for Coronavirus? Here Are Nine Different Scenarios.

How soon regions run out of hospital beds depends on how fast the novel coronavirus spreads and how many open beds they had to begin with. Here’s a look at the whole country. You can also search for your region.

Methodology: How ProPublica Mapped Hospital Capacity for Coronavirus

Here’s how ProPublica analyzed how hospital capacity could vary region to region during the pandemic.

Reporting Recipe: How to Investigate Professors’ Conflicts of Interest

Here are four kinds of stories you can do using ProPublica’s interactive database, Dollars for Profs.

Your Doctor Might Have a Disciplinary Record. Here’s How to Find Out.

Does your doctor have a criminal conviction? Has your doctor wrongly prescribed controlled substances? Use this tool to look it up.

Federally Funded Health Researchers Disclose at Least $188 Million in Conflicts of Interest. Can You Trust Their Findings?

A National Institutes of Health database, which we’re making public for the first time, shows that researchers have reported more than 8,000 “significant” financial conflicts, potentially influencing their work.

We Asked Public Universities for Their Professors’ Conflicts of Interest — and Got the Runaround

We assembled the first state-by-state database of professors’ outside income and employment. But it’s far from complete.

Medical Professors Are Supposed to Share Their Outside Income With the University of California. But Many Don’t.

A comparison of University of California filings with federal data shows that moonlighting professors are shortchanging taxpayers.

Help Us Report On Conflicts of Interest at Universities

We have collected more than 37,000 financial disclosures for professors and staff at about 20 public universities and researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health. Now, we need your help.

Dollars for Profs: Search Conflicts of Interest

For the first time ever, you can see conflict of interest and financial disclosure records for employees of universities across the country.

How Teach for America Evolved Into an Arm of the Charter School Movement

Documents obtained by ProPublica show that the Walton foundation, a staunch supporter of school choice and Teach for America’s largest private funder, was paying $4,000 for every teacher placed in a traditional public school — and $6,000 for every one placed in a charter school.

U.S. to Investigate Discrimination Against Native American Students on Montana Reservation

The Education Department said it will look into a long-standing complaint of racial inequities in Wolf Point schools after The New York Times and ProPublica wrote a story about the issue.

District of Despair: On a Montana Reservation, Schools Favor Whites Over Native Americans

Tribes say that discrimination by the Wolf Point School District contributes to some of their youth dropping out, harming themselves or even committing suicide. But the Trump administration hasn’t acted on their complaint.

On a Reservation, a Second Chance for Prisoners and Their Warden

As a school board member in Wolf Point, Montana, Ron Jackson couldn’t help struggling Native students as much as he hoped. Now some are inmates under his supervision.

DeVos’ Inspector General to Audit Dismissals of Civil Rights Complaints

The review could shed light on the Education Department’s reluctance, documented by a series of ProPublica articles, to investigate alleged discrimination by school districts and colleges.

Reporting Recipe: How to Investigate Racial Disparities at Your School

We published a trove of education data on more than 96,000 public schools across the country. Here’s how journalists can use our database to find local stories.

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