Reuters Global Managing Editor, Politics, Economics and World News, Mark Bendeich shared the following message with Reuters colleagues about Kat Stafford’s appointment as Global Race & Justice Editor:
I am delighted to announce that award-winning journalist Kat Stafford has been appointed as our Global Race & Justice Editor, effective Sept 5. With the help of the entire newsroom, Kat will help lead our collective efforts to tell stories from a wider range of perspectives. She will also pursue new and ambitious projects with a view to producing agenda-setting coverage in the areas of race, identity and social justice. We will be opening three roles for Race & Justice reporters who will report directly to Kat.
Based in her hometown of Detroit, Kat comes to us from the Associated Press, where she is a national investigative race writer and global investigations correspondent. She was recently named the recipient of the National Press Club Journalism Institute’s 2023 Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for Investigative Journalism.
In the new role, Kat will work with text and visuals editors to ensure journalists are pursuing a range of perspectives across the entire news file, from politics and society to economics and financial markets. Her team will focus heavily on deeply reported, investigative stories.
Kat started her career at Reuters, working as a stringer in Detroit for two years. She joined Michigan’s largest daily newspaper, the Detroit Free Press, as a breaking news reporter before becoming an investigative reporter. Her reporting there prompted city legislation, policy changes, congressional reviews and federal and state investigations.
In 2020, she joined the AP as a national race and ethnicity writer covering the intersection of race and politics and the presidential election. Kat is a 2021-22 University of Michigan Knight-Wallace Fellowship alumni, where she spent a year working on a multi-format project, From Birth to Death, which examined how a lifetime of health inequities has impacted generations of Black Americans.
Media contact:
Heather Carpenter
Heather.Carpenter @ tr.com