Investigative Journalism with the Advocate and the Times Picayune

GORDON RUSSELL is managing editor of investigations at The Times-Picayune | The Advocate. In addition to working as a reporter, he supervises the paper’s investigations and much of its enterprise work. He has covered many stories involving corruption and chicanery in southeastern Louisiana: the fall of former U.S. Rep. Bill Jefferson’s machine; the investigation and trial of former Mayor Ray Nagin; self-dealing in Louisiana’s prison system; and the commenting scandal within the U.S. Attorney’s Office. In 2018, he was part of a team at The Advocate that produced “Tilting the Scales,” which examined Louisiana’s allowance for non-unanimous jury verdicts. Louisianans voted to change the law in November of that year. The series received a Polk Award and a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting. Before joining The Advocate in 2013, he worked at The Times-Picayune for 14 years, starting in the River Parishes bureau. He was part of a group of reporters who stayed in the city after Hurricane Katrina to report on the storm’s aftermath, a team effort that helped the newspaper win two Pulitzer Prizes in 2006.  Two years after that, he became city editor, a job he held until the upheaval at the Picayune that began in 2012. He left for The Advocate the next year. Before moving to Louisiana, he worked as a reporter at The Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Fla., and at The Dominion Post in Morgantown, W.Va. He grew up in Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri and (mostly) California. He has a bachelor’s degree in urban studies from Columbia University and a master’s degree in journalism from New York University.