Mr. James V. Grimaldi

• Member of the 2006 Winning team, Investigative Reporting category
• Senior Writer, The Wall Street Journal
  (Investigative reporter of The Washington Post when he won the Pulitzer Prize)

James V. Grimaldi became a senior writer at The Wall Street Journal earlier this year. He previously worked for 12 years at The Washington Post, where  he won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting with two Post reporters for their work on the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. Over his career, he has covered and investigated a wide variety of topics, including politics, campaign contributions, lobbying, government, legal affairs, plane crashes, earthquakes, wildfires, riots, museums, sports and zoos.

Grimaldi graduated from the University of Missouri in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in journalism, and began his career at the San Diego Tribune (now part of UT San Diego) where he covered police and the Border Patrol. Three years later, he joined The Orange County (Calif.) Register, where he worked on a series about a state women's prison that won national awards and reported on a scandal at a University of California hospital fertility clinic, which won the staff the 1996 Pulitzer Prize. He took a leave in 1992-93 to enroll in advance studies as a Knight-Bagehot fellow in business and economics journalism at Columbia University in New York. He earned his master's degree in science (journalism) through the program.

He moved to Washington, D.C., in 1996 to become the bureau chief for The Orange County Register. He joined the Washington bureau of The Seattle Times in 1998 and covered Boeing Corp. and the federal government's antitrust trial against Microsoft Corp. In early 2000, The Washington Post hired him to cover the Microsoft lawsuit, and he won the 2002 Society of American Business Editors and Writers award for breaking news of the verdict that Microsoft had violated antitrust laws.

He wrote investigative stories about presidential and congressional elections and campaigns at the Register, Times and the Post. He covered the Florida ballot dispute over the 2000 presidential election and contributed to the book, "Deadlock: The Inside Story of America's Closest Election."  This year, he broke the story about Macau casino-owner and billionaire Sheldon Adelson's first mega-donations to Republican political campaigns.

In 2001, he became a volunteer board member of Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc., one of the leading U.S. journalism professional education organizations, and he later became president of IRE. He is a frequent speaker at IRE's annual conference and has taught other journalists how to investigate nonprofits, charities, politics and campaign finance. He also trains journalists how to use the Freedom of Information Act and open records laws. He has been a visiting Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University.

He was part of the Post team that reported and wrote stories after Sept. 11 that became a finalist for the top Pulitzer Prize in 2002. He exposed animal deaths at the National Zoo, and later wrote about spending excesses by the Smithsonian Institution. In 2010, he worked on the team that produced "The Hidden Life of Guns" series about gun ownership in America, which won the Freedom of Information Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors.