Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole Hannah-Jones (born April 9, 1976) is an American investigative journalist known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. In April 2015, she became a staff writer for The New York Times.

Hannah-Jones grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, to father Milton Hannah, who is African-American, and mother Cheryl A. Novotny, who is of Czech and English descent. She is the second of three sisters. Her father's family came from Greenwood, Mississippi, in the Mississippi Delta region, and moved to Iowa in 1947, along with many other African-Americans who came to Iowa from Mississippi, when her father was two years old.

Hannah-Jones and her sister attended almost all-white schools across town as part of a voluntary program of desegregation busing. She wrote for the high school newspaper and graduated from West High School in 1994.

Hannah-Jones has a bachelor's degree in History and African-American Studies from University of Notre Dame, which she received in 1998. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communication with a master's degree in 2003, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow.

In 2003, Hannah-Jones began her writing career working covering the education beat, which included the predominantly African American Durham Public Schools, for the Raleigh News & Observer, a position she held for three years.

In 2006, Hannah-Jones moved to Portland, Oregon, where she wrote for The Oregonian for six years. During this time she covered an enterprise assignment that included feature work, then the demographics beat, and then the government & census beats.

In 2007, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Watts Riots, Hannah-Jones wrote about its impact on the community for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission.

From 2008 to 2009, Hannah-Jones received a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies which enabled her to travel to Cuba to study universal healthcare and Cuba’s educational system under Raul Castro.

In 2011, she joined the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, which is based in New York City, where she covered civil rights and continued research she started in Oregon on redlining and in-depth investigative reporting on the lack of enforcement of the Fair Housing Act for minorities. Hannah-Jones also spent time in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where the effects of Brown v. Board of Education had little effect.

In 2015, she became a staff reporter for The New York Times.

Hannah-Jones is recognized as an authority on topics such as racial segregation, desegregation and resegregation in American schools and housing discrimination, and has spoken about these issues on national public radio broadcasts.

Her stories have been quoted in numerous other publications as being particularly important regarding race relations. Hannah-Jones reported on the school district where teenager Michael Brown had been shot, one of the "most segregated, impoverished districts in the entire state" of Missouri. Reviewer Laura Moser of Slate magazine praised her report on school resegregation, which showed how educational inequality may have been a factor in the unfortunate death of Brown.

Hannah-Jones lives in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn with her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones, and their daughter.

• 2007, 2008, 2010: Society of Professional Journalists, Pacific Northwest, Excellence in Journalism Award
• 2012: Gannett Foundation Innovation in Watchdog Journalism Award
• 2013: Sidney Award
• 2013: Columbia University, Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award
• 2015: National Awards for Education Reporting, first prize, beat reporting
• 2015: National Association of Black Journalists, Journalist of the Year
• 2015: National Magazine Award finalist, public interest
• 2015: Education Writers Association, Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting
• 2015: Emerson College President's Award for Civic Leadership
• 2015: The Root 100
• 2016: George Polk Award, radio reporting

• ^
• "This American Life Wins December Sidney for Shining a Light on Racial Profiling in the Housing Market". The Sidney Hillman Foundation. December 2013. Retrieved 22 March 2016. 
• "Tobenkin Award: Past Winners - 2013". Columbia University. Retrieved 22 March 2016. 
• Turner, Aprill (23 April 2015). "Nikole Hannah-Jones Named NABJ 2015 Journalist of the Year". National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ). Retrieved 22 March 2016. 
• Prince, Richard (10 August 2015). "NABJ "Journalist of Year" Says to Tell Blacks' Stories". Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. Retrieved 22 March 2016. 
• Walsh, Mark (21 April 2015). "ProPublica Report on Resegregation Takes Top Education Writers' Award". Education Week. Retrieved 22 March 2016. 
• "61. Nikole Hannah-Jones". The Root. 2015. Retrieved 22 March 2016. 
• Barron, James (14 February 2016). "New York Times Journalists Among Winners of 2015 Polk Awards". The New York Times. Retrieved 22 March 2016. 

• Hannah-Jones, Nikole (2012). Living Apart How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law. New York: ProPublica. ISBN 978-1-453-25444-8. OCLC 825553231. 
• Glass, Ira; Updike, Nancy; Hannah-Jones, Nikole (22 November 2013). "512: House Rules". This American Life. WBEZ.  Transcript
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole (16 April 2014). "Segregation Now: Investigating America's Racial Divide. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened". ProPublica. 
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole (2 May 2014). "School Districts Still Face Fights—and Confusion—on Integration: 60 years after Brown v. Board, the federal government's enforcement of desegregation has all but disappeared". The Atlantic. 
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole (19 December 2014). "School Segregation, the Continuing Tragedy of Ferguson". ProPublica. 
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole (25 June 2015). "Living Apart: How the Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law". ProPublica. Update to original October 29, 2012 story 
• Glass, Ira; Hannah-Jones, Nikole (31 July 2015). "562: The Problem We All Live With". This American Life. WBEZ.  Transcript
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole (9 September 2015). "A Prescription for More Black Doctors: How does tiny Xavier University in New Orleans manage to send more African-American students to medical school than any other college in the country?". The New York Times. 
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole (31 July 2015). "The Continuing Reality of Segregated Schools". The New York Times. 
• Hannah-Jones, Nikole (9 June 2016). "Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City". The New York Times Magazine. 

• Griesbach, Rebecca (25 July 2015). "Guest Columnist: Young people can't wait on change". The Tuscaloosa News. Retrieved 22 March 2016.