Center for Public Integrity adds two new reporters to environment and labor team

Introduction

The Center for Public Integrity’s Pulitzer Prize-winning environment and labor team is pleased to announce the hiring of two reporters.

Talia Buford joined the Center on July 28.

She spent three years as an energy reporter for Politico, where she covered natural gas and the Interior Department and authored the daily Afternoon Energy newsletter.

Previously, Buford spent five years with The Providence (R.I.) Journal as a legal affairs and municipal reporter.

She earned a master’s degree in the study of law from Georgetown University Law Center and studied print journalism at Hampton University.

Her work has been recognized by the Rhode Island Press Association, the National Association of Black Journalists and the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Foundation.

Jamie Smith Hopkins will join the staff on Sept. 2.

Hopkins comes to the Center after nearly 15 years with the Baltimore Sun, where she spent most of her time as a business reporter. Her coverage of the housing market, before and after the 2008 economic crash, drew awards from the National Association of Real Estate Editors and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

SABEW also honored a 2011 data-driven investigation into a pervasive property-tax break that left neighbors with identical homes paying dramatically different tax bills. Hopkins was the valedictorian of her class at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

The five-member CPI environment and labor team has been honored with more than three dozen national awards for projects such as “Breathless and Burdened,” “Toxic Clout” and “Hard Labor.”

Founded in 1989 by journalist Charles Lewis, the Center for Public Integrity is one of the country’s oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations. Our mission: to enhance democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism.

Contacts:

William Gray, Media Relations Specialist, Center for Public Integrity

(202) 481-1232, wgray@publicintegrity.org