Ryan Gabrielson -- the former reporter for the East Valley Tribune who (along with Paul Giblin) won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for exposing how immigration enforcement by the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office undermined criminal investigations and emergency response -- has a new gig.
Starting in August, Gabrielson, who has spent the past year as the 2009-2010 investigative reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, will be the public-safety investigative reporter for California Watch, a nonprofit, independent investigative reporting team based out of Berkeley.
California Watch is described on its Web site as a reporting team that "exposes injustice, waste, mismanagement, wrongdoing, questionable practices, and corruption so that those responsible can be held to account and so the public can be armed with the information needed to debate solutions and spark change," so it's probably a good fit for someone with Gabrielson's heavy bag of accolades.
Gabrielson and Giblin won the Pulitzer Prize for an investigative series called "Reasonable Doubt." The five-day series examined the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office's illegal immigration-enforcement operation and its threat to civil liberties.
Pulitzer aside, Gabrielson has also won a George Polk Award, a Sigma Delta Chi Award, and an Education Writers Association Award, prior to leaving the Trib for the Berkeley fellowship in June of last year.
Gabrielson was just one of many Trib reporters to leave the paper after its financial troubles forced it into bankruptcy.
Mark Flatten joined the Goldwater Institute last year to work as an investigative researcher and Giblin, who won the Pulitzer Prize with Gabrielson, was laid off by the Trib in January of 2009.
After being let go, Giblin helped launch the Arizona Guardian, a news site that covers state politics and government, and, most recently, is working in Afghanistan for a year as a civilian spokesman for the U.S. Military.
