Labor/environmental reporter Hamby to join BuzzFeed

Labor and environmental reporter Chris Hamby, who earlier this week won a Pulitzer Prize for the Center for Public Integrity, is leaving that organization to join the investigative team at BuzzFeed.

Johana Bhulyan of Capital New York writes, “Hamby, who will be based in Washington D.C., is otherwise in the news today as C.P.I. engages in a public argument with ABC News over credit for the Pulitzer, awarded to a three-part, 25,000-word series on coal miners who were deprived of benefits for the treatment of deadly black lung disease. The third part of the series involved a collaboration with ABC News that resulted in a ‘Nightline’ segment. (Pulitzers are typically only awarded to work in print and text-based work.)

“The project, ‘Breathless and Burdened: Dying from Black Lung, Buried by Law and Medicine,’ was an intersection of Hamby’s beats as a C.P.I. staff writer: environment and labor. But Buzzfeed editor in chief Ben Smith doesn’t expect Hamby to continue covering those specific topics for the site.

“'[Environment and labor] are certainly places he has really deep roots,’ Smith told Capital. ‘He spent the last year covering the [coal miners], but his style is to dig very, very deep into a specific thing. We’re excited to see what his next thing is.’

“Hamby, who previously worked for the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, was approached by Schoofs about working for Buzzfeed a few months ago and the two began serious talks in mid-March.”

Read more here.