ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Thomas Peele is a Bay Area-based investigative reporter who has been working in the industry since 1983. For 20 years, he worked at the Bay Area News Group, where he was part of the team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting about the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland. Thomas is the author of Killing the Messenger, a book about the 2007 murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey. Thomas was also the lead reporter for the Chauncey Bailey Project, where a collaborative group of reporters investigated who was behind the murder of Chauncey.
Thomas is currently an investigative reporter for EdSource, a nonprofit news outlet that covers education in California. He is also a lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. To read Thomas’s work, click here. And to follow him on Twitter, click here.
Thomas’s shoutout is to David DeBolt, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and the East Bay Times who shared the 2017 Pulitzer Prize with Thomas. To read David’s work, click here. To follow him on Twitter, click here.
Note: When I interviewed Thomas Peele for this episode, Tribune Publishing, a newspaper chain that owns the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun, had reached a deal to be purchased by Alden Global Capital. It’s a New York-based hedge fund that is notorious for destroying local newspapers by buying them up, selling off their assets and cutting reporting jobs. Then, in mid-March, it was reported that a Maryland hotel executive and Swiss billionaire were also interested in the purchase, potentially saving the newspaper chain from Alden. On April 4, the hotel executive and billionaire made a better offer than Alden to buy Tribune Publishing. The final buyer has yet to be announced. To learn more, click here.
