Ian T. Shearn
I spent three wonderful decades in the newspaper business, mostly holding public officials to account. My final stop was a decade at The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ) where I was an investigative reporter/editor and part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for its coverage of the demise of a NJ governor. I was also nominated for a Pulitzer for an investigative series I wrote about corruption in Newark, NJ.
After leaving an imploding newspaper industry in 2009, I became a freelance magazine writer with a thirst for deeper dives and long-form narrative writing. No longer confined to the news cycle and New Jersey boundaries, the scope of my stories grew. I traveled the Missouri countryside to find out exactly who the American Farm Bureau was serving. (It wasn’t the family farmer.) I hiked in the rainforest in the Papua New Guinea highlands, whose indigenous people had been subjugated by an immense ExxonMobil natural gas project. (You can see writing samples of my work on the Clips page.)
I also founded the Gumption Group in 2009 as a media strategy consulting outfit, which while rewarding, always took a back seat to my journalistic pursuits. Now, the Gumption Group has become something very different. It has evolved into a fluid, collaborative enterprise dedicated to the production of compelling stories and storytelling on a variety of platforms.
- Click here to see the full documentary: When We Were Hela: ExxonMobil in Papua New Guinea
- Click here to hear the documentary podcast we just launched.
- Click here to read Ian’s full resume.
Stay tuned. There is more Gumption Group news coming!