Dean Starkman is managing editor of The Audit, an online critique of financial journalism of Columbia Journalism Review.
Prior to joining CJR, Starkman was a Katrina Media Fellow at the Open Society Institute, exploring the insurance industry’s response to Hurricane Katrina. In 2005, he covered white-collar crime and the insurance industry on a contract in the New York bureau of The Washington Post.
Starkman spent eight years at The Wall Street Journal, where he covered white-collar crime, the paper industry, and served as national real estate writer, exploring, among other investigative stories, the troubled reconstruction of the World Trade Center. His work on eminent domain, beginning in 1998, was cited in Congressional testimony and elsewhere as having triggered the national debate that ended in the 2005 “Kelo” Supreme Court case on the issue.
He is a former investigative chief of The Providence Journal. As a reporter for the paper, he won numerous regional awards and helped lead the investigative team that won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Investigations for a probe of Rhode Island’s court system. The series led to the indictment of a former state Supreme Court chief justice and a former House speaker and an overhaul of judicial selection methods. He was named investigative chief in 1995. Other investigations led to indictments of other public officials, including former Rhode Island Gov. Edward D. DiPrete and his son, Dennis, and in separate probes, of a Providence police commander and four sergeants. A probe of a derailed Justice Department investigation into a Providence-based labor official led to Congressional hearings on the matter. He began his career as a staff reporter for the Anniston (Ala.) Star, covering rural counties, cops and courts, where he won Associated Press awards for an investigation of Alabama’s coroner system, which he co-wrote, and for a story on unsafe working conditions at a Georgia steel mill.
He is a graduate of McGill University, Montreal, where he was a University Scholar, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York.
