The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO has added a new journalist to our staff – Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental reporter Elizabeth McGowan.
McGowan has written several freelance investigations for VCIJ, covering the environmental hazards of highway construction in downtown Norfolk and Richmond, and probing The Nature Conservancy’s largest and riskiest ecological restoration project in southwest Virginia. Her Nature Conservancy coverage is a finalist this year for the Virginia Association of Broadcasters' best investigative reporting.
McGowan is based in Washington, D.C., and will focus her coverage on the environment and energy. Her real skill is immersing herself into communities, listening to people, and explaining how decisions made by businesses and government affect humans and the landscapes they call home.
She won a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2013 as a staff correspondent at InsideClimate News. The prize-winning series, “The Dilbit Disaster,” revealed the devastation that an enormous oil spill caused in communities along Michigan’s Kalamazoo River. A book version of those groundbreaking dispatches won the Rachel Carson Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists.
In addition to her dogged reporting, McGowan is an indefatigable outdoorswoman. She has hiked the entire Appalachian Trail and completed a cross-country, solo bicycling trip from Oregon’s Pacific coast to the Chesapeake Bay. She chronicled the journey in a book, “Outpedaling the Big C: My Healing Cycle Across America.”
McGowan joins two other recent additions to the WHRO newsroom: Brian Saunders, a Norfolk native with a master's degree in journalism from Temple University, has returned to cover his hometown; Ashley White, originally from Florida with journalism experience throughout the South, reports on education.
WHRO now boasts a newsroom staff of 18 employees, covering Hampton Roads and the entire Commonwealth of Virginia.
Reach Louis Hansen at louis.hansen@vcij.org.
