Jo Becker

Jo Becker
Education	B.S., University of Colorado Boulder
Occupation	Reporter
Notable credit(s)	The New York Times, Washington Post

Jo Becker is an award-winning American journalist and author working as an investigative reporter for The New York Times. Formerly with the Washington Post, she and her colleague there Barton Gellman won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of articles titled Angler, which explored the role of Vice President Dick Cheney. (Angler was a Cheney Secret Service codename.)

Work

Becker worked for the St. Petersburg Times, the Concord Monitor and the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour before starting at the Washington Post in 2000. There she covered local and state politics before joining the investigative projects team. Since 2007, she has worked at The New York Times as an investigative reporter, where she has written about diverse topics ranging from the presidential elections to the 2008 financial meltdown, the British phone hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch's media empire, American efforts to thwart Iran's nuclear program, Hezbollah's clandestine financing operations, the Penn State sex abuse scandal, the Obama administration's policies on drone warfare with Times colleague Scott Shane and a series on Russia called "Putin's Way.". In 2014, she published Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality, a book about the epic legal battle to bring the issue of same-sex marriage before the Supreme Court. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post named Forcing the Spring one of the best books of 2014.

Other

Becker has a bachelor's degree from the University of Colorado in political science. For the academic year of 2012-2013, Becker was appointed as a visiting Ferris Professor of journalism at Princeton University, teaching investigative reporting.

Awards

• 2010 Gerald Loeb Award for Business and Financial Journalism finalist for "Hack Attack," a New York Times investigation of the British phone hacking scandal.
• Shared the 2009 Gerald Loeb Award for Business and Financial Journalism for "The Reckoning," a New York Times series on the 2008 financial meltdown. The series also was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
• 2008 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, with Barton Gellman.
• 2008 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, with Barton Gellman.
• 2007 George Polk Award for political reporting, with Barton Gellman.
• 2005 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting for reporting on lead in water systems across the country
• 1998 Livingston Award for coverage of corruption in local government

External links

• Becker and Gellman's Angler
• Jo Becker discusses drone and cyber warfare on MSNBC Weekend with Alex Witt, June 2, 2012 - video
• Appearances on C-SPAN