ProPublica hires WSJ’s Berzon, a Pulitzer winner

Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Alexandra Berzon has been hired by ProPublica as a reporter.

She has been at the paper for 12 years and previously covered gambling and casinos from the Los Angeles bureau.

This year, she did crucial reporting on who provided the money for the Jan. 6 rally that led to the attack on the Capitol. In 2019, she was the lead reporter on an investigation that documented how Amazon’s third-party platform peddled an array of products that were unsafe or even banned. The series was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

In 2019, she was part of the Journal team that won a Pulitzer for exposing Donald Trump’s secret payoffs to Stormy Daniels and another woman. She also led an investigation documenting accounts from numerous former employees that casino mogul Steve Wynn, then the finance chairman of the Republic National Committee, had engaged in widespread sexual misconduct.

Berzon’s investigations in 2008 into a spate of construction worker deaths on the Las Vegas Strip won the Pulitzer for Public Service when she was at the Las Vegas Sun

She joined the Journal in 2009 as the gambling industry reporter and has delivered numerous memorable stories and scoops – from the man who gambled away $127 million to a dramatic split within Steve Wynn’s casino empire to famous poker pros who ended up being accused of running a Ponzi scheme.

Berzon was also a key member of Journal teams that reported the Deep Water Horizon crisis, covered mass shootings in both Colorado and Arizona, jumped on the tragic fertilizer plant explosion in Texas and examined the roots of the Tea Party.

She graduated from Vassar College and Cal-Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.