These are challenging times for truth, and for those who live by it. In a world so divided, with cruelty and corruption ascendant, with daily challenges to the rule of law and assaults on the media, on facts, and on democracy itself, we writers have an obligation to produce journalism that has an impact.

OUR PRINCIPLES

At Assignment, we believe that as journalists we must:

  • Understand that telling honest, affecting stories has never been more necessary.

  • Hold our work to the highest ethical standards.

  • Embrace complexity, depth, and rigor.

  • Refuse to be stonewalled. Refuse to be intimidated. Refuse to be fooled.

  • Challenge our assumptions.

  • Embrace nuance.

  • Tell our stories with precision, compassion, grace, and beauty.

  • Verify the facts, and then verify them again. And again.

  • Wield truth in a post-truth world. Wield it for the public good.

OUR MISSION

Assignment is a nonprofit organization whose duty is to train, mentor, and support talented writers in the craft of ambitious investigative reporting and creative nonfiction writing. We work with promising journalists who dream of undertaking deep investigations and complex, meaningful stories at a time when there has never been a greater need for them.

  • Assignment Fellows are selected by invitation to attend our workshops, craft talks, classes, and seminars based on referrals from highly accomplished authors, editors, publishers, and writing instructors, as well as extensive review of published work in print and online. We regret to say that at the present time we cannot consider unsolicited applications.

  • Our all-expenses-paid Assignment workshops and related craft talks, seminars, and classes often focus on projects that are in the early stages of development. The way we see it, Assignment workshops, which launched in June 2025, are just the start: We continue to work with our fellows throughout the journey to publication and beyond. Our aim is to build long-standing creative and professional relationships, establishing a community of exceptional nonfiction storytellers our fellows can rely on for mentorship and support in their efforts to publish work that brings the moral force of outstanding reporting and writing to bear on ignorance and abuses of power, wherever they exist.

  • At Assignment, we believe the most impactful stories require a combination of deep reporting, strong narrative, and evocative prose. The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, put it best when she said that many journalists “maintain a sort of species difference between narrative and investigative reporting. Narrative writing must be soft and explanatory, while investigative reporting must be bullet-pointed and just the facts. This surprises and even saddens me. The best narrative isn’t soft, and the best investigative reporting isn’t only steel-plated facts. The best narrative pursues both readers and social change relentlessly.”

WHAT WE DO

We work closely with our Assignment Fellows to develop expertise in a wide range of areas, including:

  • Finding the big idea—and the factual story that communicates it in a compelling manner

  • Proving—or disproving—those ideas through the intensive, ethical gathering of facts

  • The use of open-source investigative tools, data reporting, open records laws, and more

  • Advanced interviewing techniques

  • The practice of immersion journalism

  • The all-important art of developing a story’s voice

  • The architecture, rhythm, and pacing essential to compelling storytelling

  • Scene setting, character development, and other narrative techniques, with an emphasis on artful, nuanced writing that engages a wide audience and has a tangible impact on the reader

  • The critical work of self-editing

  • Finding—or creating—avenues for publication that have the potential to generate sustainable income while contributing to the greater social and political good

  • Working collaboratively with editors, producers, fact-checkers, and agents

  • And, last but not least, speaking truth to power, even when confronted with efforts to intimidate, stonewall, censor, silence, or marginalize.

WHO WE ARE

We’re a diverse group of authors, reporters, editors, podcasters, documentary filmmakers, and educators dedicated to sharing critical concepts, tools, techniques, and processes to help shape our fellows’ reporting and the storytelling that follows.

STAFF:

  • is the author of eight books of narrative nonfiction and investigative journalism, including Into the Wild, Into Thin Air (a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize), Under the Banner of Heaven, Where Men Win Glory, and Missoula. After graduating from Hampshire College in 1976, he worked as a carpenter and commercial salmon fisherman before embarking on a writing career. In 1999 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, whose citation said, “Krakauer combines the tenacity and courage of the finest tradition of investigative journalism with the stylish subtlety and profound insight of the born writer.” In the aftermath of the 1996 Everest tragedy that was the subject of Into Thin Air, Jon became involved with the American Himalayan Foundation in order to repay his debt of gratitude to the Sherpas who assisted him and others in that calamity. He serves as the organization’s board chair.

  • is an editor, publisher, and journalist who has worked with both emerging writers and winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Booker Prize. He has served as the editor of Outside, which he led to five National Magazine Awards, including a record three consecutive prizes for General Excellence; the editor of Men’s Journal and Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine; executive editor of HarperCollins; editor at large at Scribd; and co-founder and editor-in-chief of Byliner, a pioneer in digital longform narrative publishing. He is head of author relations for Created by Humans and co-founder of the Santa Fe International Literary Festival. Mark has published a range of authors, including Michael Lewis, David Foster Wallace, Susan Orlean, David Quammen, Alexandra Fuller, Sebastian Junger, Annie Proulx, Ann Patchett, Hampton Sides, Michael Paterniti, Amy Tan, Colum McCann, Buzz Bissinger, Denis Johnson, William Langewiesche, and Jon Krakauer. Mark has also consulted for Condé Nast, Time Inc., the National Geographic Society, IAC, Hearst, and The New York Times and has taught narrative nonfiction writing at Colorado College.

  • is the former deputy editor of Outside, Play: The New York Times Sports Magazine, and Byliner. She has edited such bestselling and prizewinning authors as Mimi Swartz, Elizabeth Weil, Bob Shacochis, Ann Patchett, Peter Heller, Laura Lippman, Michael Sokolove, Annie Proulx, E. Jean Carroll, Sara Corbett, Caroline Alexander, Mary Roach, Barry Lopez, Susan Orlean, Hampton Sides, Daniel Coyle, Anne Helen Peterson, Garrett M. Graff, Bonnie Tsui, Scott Simon, James Salter, Peter Matthiessen, and Jon Krakauer. Laura has consulted for the New York Times Company, Wenner Media, New York Media, Hearst, and Scribd and has been a guest lecturer at the Medill School of Journalism.

ADVISORS:

  • is a longtime staff writer at The New York Times Magazine and reporter at ProPublica, and a former senior editor at Texas Monthly. Her story “False Witness,” a ProPublica–New York Times investigation into jailhouse informants, received a National Magazine Award for reporting in 2020 and was recognized with the Hillman Prize, the IRE Award, the Taylor Family Award for Fairness in Journalism, and the MOLLY National Journalism Prize. Her 2010 Texas Monthly investigation about a wrongly convicted man who was sent to Texas’s death row was credited with helping him win his freedom after eighteen years behind bars. In 2014, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University awarded her the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism. Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and has been anthologized in The Best American Magazine Writing, The Best American Crime Reporting, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. Her book A Deal with the Devil will be published in October 2025.

  • is a New Yorker staff writer and the author of the bestsellers Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction, and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, both of which have been adapted into limited television series. His most recent book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, is a collection of several of his New Yorker stories. Patrick’s eight-part podcast Wind of Change was a wild tale of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music. Among Patrick’s preoccupations are “crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.”

  • is considered the godmother of open-source investigations. She is the co-faculty director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an adjunct professor in the School of Law and a lecturer in the School of Journalism. She co-founded the Human Rights Center’s Investigations Lab, which has pioneered the use of social media and other online information to strengthen legal investigations and investigative reporting, and she has trained hundreds of war crimes investigators, human rights researchers, and journalists around the world in these methods. Alexa has co-chaired the Technology Advisory Board of the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court and is the co-author of several books, including Graphic: Trauma and Meaning in Our Online Lives, Digital Witness: Using Open Source Information for Human Rights Investigation, Documentation and Accountability, and Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror.

  • is the open-source investigations training manager at the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, leading the center’s training program on digital methods for professionals in advocacy, law, and journalism. He is also a researcher and visual journalist. Through the Human Rights Center Investigations Lab, he has contributed to investigations into the 2021 coup in Myanmar and a 2023 massacre of children by Burkina Faso’s security forces. Before joining the UC Berkeley community, Brian worked in the news industry as a photojournalist for The Chicago Tribune and other newspapers and launched new media products for major publishing companies.

  • has written now-legendary narrative nonfiction for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, GQ, and Outside. His books include Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain, The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese, and Love and Other Ways of Dying, a collection of some of his magazine writing. Mike is working on a book about history, memory, and the discovery of the North Pole.

  • is a reporter for ProPublica covering the Southwest and the author of the acclaimed Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana. The New York Times called it “an immersive portrait of a small tribal town where shared history runs deep, opportunity feels elusive, and basketball is a visceral expression of collective pride, hope, and grit.” Abe has been an editor at Outside and has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, Harper’s, and New York. He’s the winner of the 2019 American Mosaic Journalism Prize for deep reporting about underrepresented communities and has taught at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, the Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, and the University of Wyoming’s Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources.

  • is the director of the MFA program in creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and the author of the memoir Whiskey Tender, which was a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in Nonfiction. As The Washington Post put it, “In its mesmerizing dive into tumultuous childhood stories and its excavation of a particular place and time, Whiskey Tender recalls Mary Karr’s now-classic memoir The Liars’ Club. What sets Taffa’s memoir apart is its study of the political, racial, and ancestral forces that shape a life.” Deborah is currently at work on a sequel.