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Kat Stafford is the Global Race and Justice Editor at Reuters, where she works with text and visual editors to ensure journalists are pursuing a range of perspectives across the entire global news file, from politics and society to economics and financial markets. She was previously a national investigative writer and global investigations correspondent at The Associated Press, where she investigated how structural racism fueled inequity across America through the lens of politics, government, health, environmental justice and more.

Her journalism journey began when she was a child growing up on Detroit's east side. Her father was the neighborhood block club association president and the community put together a monthly community newsletter full of news that residents felt went uncovered by local media. It was her first exposure to community-driven journalism, laying the foundation for her career where she works to highlight under-resourced and historically excluded​ Black and other communities of color.

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She joined the AP in February 2020 as a national race and ethnicity writer to cover the intersection of race and politics. But two weeks into her AP tenure, COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic, transforming her role to focus on covering the pandemic's disparate impact on Black and other communities of color, the racial justice movement and the presidential election. Prior to joining the AP, Stafford was an investigative reporter at the Detroit Free Press. Her reporting there prompted city legislation, policy changes, congressional reviews and federal and state investigations.

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Stafford is a 2021-22 University of Michigan Knight-Wallace Fellowship alumni, where she was the visionary behind an award-winning project that examined how a lifetime of health disparities impact Black Americans from birth to death.

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She is the former vice president of the Investigative Reporters and Editors' Board of Directors, the industry's leading nonprofit organization focused on investigative journalism. She is also the past chair of IRE's Member Services Committee, deputy chair of the National Association of Black Journalists' Print Task Force and former Vice President of the Society of Professional Journalists' Detroit chapter, where she was also the FOIA chair of the board.

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Stafford has received several awards for her work. She received the 2024 Spirit of Diversity Award from Wayne State University's Journalism Institute for Media Diversity, for her continued efforts to increase representation of journalists of color throughout the industry and her work to reimagine how communities of color are centered in news coverage globally. The Spirit of Diversity Award is a distinguished honor that has been bestowed to some of the nation's leading journalists. She was also the 2023 recipient of the National Press Club Journalism Institute’s Neil and Susan Sheehan Award for Investigative Journalism. She was a finalist for MIT's 2021 McElheny Award science journalism award for an investigative project about lead poisoning and housing demolitions in Detroit. She also was awarded Michigan's Associated Press Media Editors 2019 First Amendment Award.

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She was named a 2019 Ida B. Wells Investigative Fellow and received the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2017 Young Journalist of the Year Award from the organization's Detroit chapter. Stafford was also a 2016 Fellow of the Loyola Law School, Los Angeles’ Journalist Law School. She is the past vice president of the SPJ Detroit chapter and a board member of Eastern Michigan University’s student newspaper, The Eastern Echo. Stafford and her reporting have been featured on numerous television and radio shows. She regularly moderates panel discussions and gives speeches about race in America.

 

Stafford is also leading voice on representation and equity and leads training sessions on equitable sourcings, structural inequities and racism and investigative journalism for many organizations, including the Ida B. Wells Society, Poynter Institute, the Maynard Institute and several colleges and universities across the nation. She's also participated on international panels and events, including the U.S. Embassy Paris, France, the Global Investigative Journalism Network and the International Center for Journalists.