Award-winning journalist Jessica Yellin joins Center board

Introduction

Award-winning television journalist Jessica Yellin, who has covered the White House and Capitol Hill and reported from around the globe, has joined the Center for Public Integrity’s board of directors.

“I am thrilled to support the exceptional work of the Center, an organization that does what journalism is meant to do: dig, inform, educate public opinion and hold power to account,” Yellin said. “This work is vital to our democracy, and I’m honored to be a part of their efforts going forward.”

Yellin, 45, a native of Los Angeles and graduate of Harvard University, has had a distinguished career that has taken her all over the country and the world. She has provided illuminating insight into the nature of political power and the reality of Washington policymaking. Yellin has covered Congress, domestic politics, state and national elections, the culture wars and issues facing women in the workplace. She has reported from Russia, China, Europe, Latin America and Mongolia.

Over the course of a six-year stint at CNN, Yellin served as Capitol Hill correspondent, national political correspondent and chief White House correspondent. She previously worked for ABC News and MSNBC, and began her career in local television news in Florida. Her work has been published in the New York Times, The Daily Beast, Details, Entertainment Weekly and The Los Angeles Times.

Yellin is completing her first novel and is a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center on Communications, Leadership and Policy.

“We are pleased to welcome Jessica Yellin onto the board of directors,” said Center board co-chairman Scott Siegler. “As a successful author, an exemplary journalist and a sophisticated thinker, she will be a powerful new voice in our boardroom.”

The Center for Public Integrity, founded in 1989, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization based in Washington, D.C. In recent years, the Center has won a variety of journalistic honors, including a Polk award and a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Its pieces are often reprinted in prominent outlets like The Washington Post, USA TODAY and POLITICO.

The Center’s website is currently enjoying a spike in traffic owing in part to intense reader interest in the many policy changes being undertaken by a new administration in the nation’s capital. In recent weeks, the Center’s work has been singled out for praise by commentator Bill Moyers, The Daily Kos and The FOIA Project, which tracks the media’s use of freedom-of-information litigation to obtain government documents.