Lorie Hearn
Lorie Hearn is the executive director and editor of Investigative Newsource.
She founded the institute in the summer of 2009, following a successful 35-year reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters.
Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware in 1974. During the next two decades, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts. High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
Kevin Crowe
Kevin Crowe is an investigative reporter and database specialist for Investigative Newsource.
Prior to joining the institute, he worked for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, reporting on campaign finance and donation limits, phantom real estate buyers, school test scores and local government spending. Kevin helped expose enormous differences in how states – and counties – investigate mysterious infant deaths for the award-winning series “Saving Babies” while at Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C.
A native of Missouri, Kevin spends much of his free time in the great outdoors, mostly in the pursuit of big bass. He is a graduate of Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, and of the Missouri School of Journalism.
Kelly Thornton
Kelly Thornton is an investigative reporter with Investigative Newsource.
Prior to joining the Institute in the fall of 2010, Thornton spent almost two decades at The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she covered everything from city government, military and law enforcement to transportation, politics and business.
Ultimately she specialized in criminal justice and legal affairs, winning numerous awards for breaking some of the region’s biggest stories, including the exclusive details of the lives of San Diego-based Sept. 11 terrorists and their associates, the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide, the San Diego killer of fashion designer Gianni Versace, the firing of U.S. Attorney Carol Lam, and many others.
In one investigation, Thornton exposed how the city’s most influential and well-connected lobbyists were skirting laws requiring them to publicly disclose their activities. The story prompted a crackdown on lobbyists. In another, she reported the plight of four Iranian brothers, who at the time were the nation’s longest-held post-Sept. 11 detainees. They remained in custody without charges for more than three years, and were eventually released.
Thornton is a San Diego native. She is a graduate of Westmont College in Santa Barbara and lives with her husband, son, and Chesapeake Bay Retriever “Dude” in Ocean Beach. She is a 25-time marathoner and a singer in a band.
Brooke Williams
Brooke Williams is an investigative reporter for Investigative Newsource.
She has practiced investigative journalism on both coasts. Prior to the opening of the institute, Williams was a reporter for The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she covered Indian gambling and investigated finances at the city of San Diego, which was facing a near-bankrupcty crisis.
In 2005, Williams was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and won a Freedom of Information award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for an investigation into the city’s land holdings. In 2009, she won first place for investigative reporting and “best in show” awards from the San Diego Press Club and first place for investigative reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists for a series of stories that led the federal government to launch a criminal investigation into two companies that hauled away debris after the devastating wildfires of 2007.
Prior to working for the Union-Tribune, Williams was a writer for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization in Washington, D.C. She wrote a chapter in the “Buying of the President,” a national bestseller, and worked on “Windfalls of War,” an investigation of defense contracts, which won a George Polk Award.
Williams graduated from the Missouri School of Journalism in 2001. She enjoys modern dance and ballet and practices yoga.
