Ken Armstrong

Investigative reporter, The Seattle Times

Investigative reporter at The Seattle Times when the book was written, later at The Marshall Project and ProPublica.

Ken Armstrong was a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at The Seattle Times, where he wrote about illegally sealed court records and the unchecked rise of the MRSA pathogen, among other subjects.

At the Chicago Tribune, his reporting with Steve Mills on the failures of Illinois’ death penalty system helped prompt the governor to halt executions.

With Michael Berens he won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, for a Seattle Times series on how Washington state steered Medicaid patients to methadone, a cheap but unpredictable painkiller linked to more than 2,000 deaths. In his career he has won or shared in four Pulitzer Prizes.

He received Columbia University’s John Chancellor Award for lifetime achievement in 2009, was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard and the McGraw Professor of Writing at Princeton, and later reported for The Marshall Project and ProPublica.