Daniel Golden

Journalist and author Daniel Golden is a Boston-based senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. Golden has been instrumental in three Pulitzer Prizes, two as an editor and one as a reporter. He co-edited a ProPublica series on Latin American asylum-seekers caught between the U.S. government and the MS-13 gang, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Before joining ProPublica in October 2016, he worked as managing editor for education and enterprise at Bloomberg News. There he edited a series about tax inversions — companies moving headquarters overseas to avoid taxes — that earned Bloomberg’s only Pulitzer Prize in 2015.

Golden won a Pulitzer as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal in 2004 for a series of articles on preferences for children and donors in college admissions. He expanded that series into a critically acclaimed national bestseller, “The Price of Admission: How America’s Ruling Class Buys Its Way Into Elite Colleges — and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates.” An updated edition was published in October 2019 with new reporting on the Operation Varsity Blues scandal.

Golden’s book, “Spy Schools: How The CIA, FBI, and Foreign Intelligence Secretly Exploit America’s Universities,” was published by Henry Holt in October 2017. Spy novelist John Le Carre praised it as “timely and shocking,” and former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called it a “must-read.” He is the co-author, with ProPublica reporter Renee Dudley, of "The Ransomware Hunting Team," which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in fall 2022. Amazon made it an "editor's pick" for best nonfiction of the year, and the New York Times described it as "brilliant."

Golden spent 17 years as a staff reporter at the Boston Globe, including a stint on its Spotlight team, and served as senior editor for investigations at Conde Nast Portfolio. Among other honors, he has won three George Polk awards, three National Headliner awards, the Sigma Delta Chi award, the Gerald Loeb Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the New York Press Club Gold Keyboard award and two Education Writers Association Grand Prizes. He was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for public service for a series exposing recruiting abuses by for-profit colleges. A Harvard College graduate, he was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford in 1998-99.