David Fallis named Investigations Editor

Washington Post

07-02-2025

I'm pleased to share that David Fallis, one of The Post's most accomplished and experienced journalists and a well-known champion and exemplar of investigative journalism across the field, has agreed to become our new Investigations Editor, reporting to me.
A 26-year veteran of The Post, David has been deputy for the team for the past decade and has been centrally involved in much of our most ambitious and significant work. His range has been wide, and he has been a consistent innovator when it comes to story formats. He has partnered with virtually every team at The Post as Investigations has grown from a small team with a handful of journalists to a newsroom-wide investigative engine. He helped launch the quick strike team currently headed by Eric Rich, establish and run the program that embedded American University students with journalists, and hired The Post's first FOIA director, who has force-multiplied our ability to pry loose critical public records.
Last year David oversaw The Post's investigation into Indian Boarding schools, revealing the consequences of the 150-year attempt by the federal government to force assimilation on Native Americans. In 2023, he led and co-edited The Collection, an investigation that began with a pitch from former Post copy aide Claire Healy revealing more than 250 human brains stored in a Smithsonian storage unit. One of the stories, 'Searching for Maura,' was told as an illustration and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Illustrated Reporting and Commentary.
In 2022, he led and co-edited the investigation on Broken Doors, a six-part podcast that exposed the lack of accountability for no-knock warrants and police abuse of the tactic. The project was named a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Audio. In 2020 he co-edited The Post's first investigative podcast, Canary, a seven-part series which revealed the intertwining stories of two women who suffered sexual assaults decades apart. The podcast won Edward R. Murrow and Robert F. Kennedy awards.
In 2019, David edited The Afghanistan Papers project, a six-part investigation from Craig Whitlock based on a secret trove of documents that revealed senior officials in three administrations lied about the 18-year military campaign. The project won a George Polk Award for Military Reporting, the Scripps Howard Award for Investigative Reporting and the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for International Reporting. That same year he was co-editor on The Opioid Files, an investigation that obtained and analyzed a confidential government database to reveal that drug companies flooded the country with 76 billion pills as overdose deaths climbed. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Public Service Award.
He has also led a multi-part series that mapped 52,000 homicides in 50 of America's major cities and revealed clusters of unsolved killings disproportionately in communities of color, which was a 2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Explanatory Reporting, and with Lori Montgomery ran a team of journalists tracking fatal shootings by police. The 2015 investigation of police shootings won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
Please join me in congratulating David as he steps into this important job.