Joshua Benton

Joshua Benton founded Nieman Lab in 2008 and was its director for 12 years before returning to reporting as senior writer in 2020. Before spending a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, he spent 10 years in newspapers, mostly at The Dallas Morning News. His reports there on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from a dozen foreign countries, been a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, and three times been a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. He was once a rock critic for The Toledo Blade. He’s a proud Cajun from small-town south Louisiana who wrote his first HTML in 1994.