The Gumption Group

Ian T. Shearn

I spent three wonderful decades in the newspaper business, mostly holding public officials to account. My final newspaper was a The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ) where over a decade 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.  (For these and other samples of my work, you can go to the Clips page..) In 2020 I was a regular contributor to NJPBS/NJ Spotlight News. 

 Click here for resume: resume2015 pdf

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