Brant Houston

Professor Brant Houston holds the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting and teaches investigative and advanced reporting in the Department of Journalism in the College of Media at Illinois.

Houston became the chair after serving for more than a decade as the executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a 4000-member organization, and as a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Before joining IRE, he was an award-winning investigative reporter at daily newspapers for 17 years.

Houston also is the author of three editions of the textbook, "Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide," and co-author of the fourth edition and fifth edition of "The Investigative Reporter's Handbook." Currently he is working on projects involving nonprofit journalism, ethnic media newsrooms, and new technologies for news-gathering.

Houston serves at the chair of the board of the Investigative News Network, a coalition of nonprofit journalism centers, and as a coordinator for the Global Investigative Journalism Network, which he co-founded in the year 2000. In addition, he helps oversee an award-winning community information initiative and investigative newsroom in central Illinois known as cu-citizenaccess.org. He recently won a Chancellor's public engagement award for his work on the project.

Knight Foundation logoThe Knight Foundation says the chair holders are "professional journalists who inspire excellence; collaborators who reach out and innovate; catalysts around whom universities can build expanded programs; visionaries who strive to improve American journalism." There are chairs at only 21 universities in the United States.

Houston was part of the newsroom staff of The Kansas City Star that won a Pulitzer Prize for its work on the 1981 walkway collapse at the city's Hyatt Regency Hotel, and he was one of four investigative team members that won a Headliners Award for its work on misconduct by Kansas City area building inspectors.

At The Hartford Courant, he won awards for investigations into state and federal government programs and was the paper’s database editor. During a total of 14 years at IRE, both as a managing director and as executive director, Houston oversaw the creation of numerous training programs nationally and internationally and also helped it strengthen and increase its membership.