Board of Directors

Josh Hinkle is KXAN’s director of investigations and innovation, leading the station’s 13-person investigative team on multiple platforms. He also leads KXAN’s political coverage as the executive producer and host of “State of Texas,” a weekly program focused on the Texas Legislature and elections, seen in 14 markets statewide.

His work surrounding investigative journalism, political reporting and multi-platform storytelling has been honored in recent years with an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, an IRE Award, six national Edward R. Murrow Awards, three Walter Cronkite Awards, an SPJ Sigma Delta Chi Award, six National Headliner Awards, a National Press Club Award, three NLGJA Excellence in Journalism Awards and the American Legion’s Fourth Estate Award.

Josh was named Reporter of the Year by the Texas Associated Press Broadcasters in both 2012 and 2013 and also earned an Emmy as Best General Assignment/Spot News Reporter in Texas. In 2024, the Texas Association of Broadcasters recognized him with the Jason Hightower Award for Broadcast Excellence. Before coming to Austin, Josh worked as a reporter, anchor and producer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Columbia, Missouri; and Oklahoma City.

In addition to serving as IRE Board president, he serves on the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas board of directors. He has chaired IRE’s training and member services committees, along with leading a recurring master class on managing investigators. Additionally, he sits on the board of governors for the Lone Star Emmys, teaches as a faculty member for the NPPA News Video Workshop, serves as a journalist of color fellowship mentor for the Maynard Institute and is a member of IRE, SPJ, NPPA and NLGJA.

Josh earned his bachelor’s degree with honors in journalism and Spanish from Oklahoma State University, where he returned in 2024 as the Paul Miller Lecture Series speaker. After OSU, he gained his master’s degree in journalism and public policy from the University of Missouri – where he was also a graduate assistant in the political radio reporting program.

Josh teaches broadcast journalism at St. Edward’s University in Austin. X: @hinklej

Kate Howard is an editorial director at The Center for Investigative Reporting, where she works for the Reveal radio show and podcast and Mother Jones. Previously, she spent four years as managing editor at the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit newsroom by Louisville Public Media. There, Howard oversaw a team of five reporters and edited the investigative podcast Dig, which won an IRE Award and was nominated for a Peabody Award. Previously, Kate spent nearly 14 years as a newspaper reporter, including stints at The Tennessean, The Florida Times-Union and the Omaha World-Herald. She has served on the IRE board since 2022, and is also on the board of directors at Louisville Public Media. Howard is based in Louisville, Kentucky.

Mark Greenblatt is the executive editor of the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Previously, Greenblatt was the senior national investigative correspondent at Scripps News in Washington, D.C., where he worked and mentored other investigative journalists for more than a decade. Greenblatt, a nationally award-winning journalist with nearly 25 years of experience, has worked for local TV stations, networks, newspapers and multi-episode deep-dive podcasts. He regularly collaborates with national and global partners such as Reveal, ProPublica, USA Today and The Toronto Star, among others.

Greenblatt is a past president and former treasurer of the Fund for Investigative Journalism. He is a longtime IRE member dating back to his early days as a student volunteer at IRE’s headquarters at the University of Missouri, where Greenblatt was student president of the journalism school.

Ana Ley, a journalist with 15 years of experience, is a reporter at The New York Times. Previously, she worked at five newspapers, including the San Antonio Express-News in San Antonio, Texas; the Las Vegas Sun and Las Vegas Review-Journal; and at the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia, where she was a reporter and then editor.

She is an active member of IRE, serving as a mentor in the year-long Chauncey Bailey Journalist of Color Investigative Reporting Fellowship, speaking on panels at various conferences and serving on several committees. Proficient in FOIA law and computer-assisted reporting skills, Ley has won numerous awards over the years, including a first-place Headliner Award in 2021 for local news coverage. She also was a finalist for a Livingston Award that year for local reporting on the enduring legacy of racism in Virginia politics. Ley was born in the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. She graduated from the University of Texas-Pan American. She is a longtime member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, and served as a mentor for NAHJ's Student Project for eight years.

Alejandra Cancino is a senior reporter at Injustice Watch, a Chicago-based nonprofit newsroom investigating the Cook County court system. Her award-winning work focuses on the intersection of government and business and combines data with personal stories to expose systemic failures.

Most recently, she co-authored a five-part narrative series detailing how lower-income Chicago tenants are trapped in unsafe buildings, forced to pay rising rents even as many of their landlords are allowed to shirk their responsibilities. Through an unprecedented data analysis, she and a co-reporter identified hundreds of buildings in Chicago where tenants faced eviction as the city was suing their landlords over unsafe conditions and exposed how laws and systems created to help tenants were failing.
Earlier in her career, Cancino covered manufacturing, economic development and labor as a business reporter at the Chicago Tribune. There, her investigative stories revealed how some corporations took advantage of an Illinois’ tax incentive program aimed at creating jobs even while laying off workers. Her reporting led to public hearings, an increase in the program’s transparency, and a de-facto moratorium of special tax breaks for large corporations.

Cancino also spent a year as an editor training emerging journalists at City Bureau. She is a former president and board member of the Chicago Headline Club, the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. In that role, she co-created a mentorship program aimed at training young journalists of color in FOIA and other investigative skills.

Cancino is a proud University of Florida alum. Go Gators! Social Media: @writeralejandra.bsky.social

Brian M. Rosenthal is an investigative reporter at The New York Times and a Pulitzer Prize winner. Before joining The Times in 2017, he worked as a beat reporter covering state government, first for The Seattle Times and then for the Houston Chronicle. He won the 2020 Pulitzer in Investigative Reporting for a series of stories about predatory lending in the taxi industry, and he was part of a team that won the 2015 Pulitzer in Breaking News for coverage of a deadly mudslide. He also was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer in Public Service for revealing that Texas was secretly denying special education to tens of thousands of children with disabilities. He also has won an IRE medal, a national Emmy Award, the George A. Polk Award (three times) and the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting, in addition to being named a finalist for the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics. He grew up in Indiana and graduated from Northwestern University. Twitter: @brianmrosenthal

Jodie Fleischer is managing editor, investigative content, for Cox Media Group. Previously, she was an investigative reporter for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. She’s earned several of journalism’s top honors including a duPont-Columbia Award, an IRE Award for Innovation, and numerous regional Murrow and Emmy awards. In 2015, she was recognized by the FBI director for her investigation of sovereign citizens that led to a dozen arrests and a change in state law. Her reporting on deadly police shootings helped change Georgia law to limit special treatment for officers. Jodie also exposed fraudulent activity which prompted the closure of a drug rehab run by the Church of Scientology, and her government corruption investigations have led to numerous indictments and resignations. Jodie also worked for WSB-TV in Atlanta and stations in Orlando and South Carolina. She’s a graduate of the University of Florida. Twitter: @jodienbc4

Cindy Galli was most recently the executive producer of ABC News’ award-winning investigative unit, where she oversaw a team of reporters and producers specializing in investigations ranging from government fraud and corporate corruption to racial injustice, consumer and environmental issues. The team was recently honored with Peabody and Emmy nominations as well as a duPont-Columbia Silver Baton, national Murrow and Overseas Press Club awards for its work. Cindy also built and launched a collaborative team comprised of owned station and affiliate reporters, working closely with her team to share resources and innovate enterprise storytelling across many platforms. Cindy also conceived and oversaw the network’s groundbreaking commitment to stay in and report on Uvalde, Texas in 2022 in response to the mass shooting there. A longtime consumer investigative producer and member of IRE since 1994, Cindy got her start at KGO-TV in San Francisco. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Cindy is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.

Mary Hudetz is a ProPublica reporter based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She has spent the better part of the past decade reporting on federal policy and Indigenous issues. She previously worked for The Associated Press and the Seattle Times as a reporter, and is past president of the Indigenous Journalists Association, formerly known as the Native American Journalists Association.

Caresse Jackman is a national consumer investigative reporter with InvestigateTV/Gray Media based in Washington, D.C., who has worked in the news industry for 16 years. As a Black woman and the daughter of Guyanese immigrants, she seeks to increase diversity within the news industry.

She joined Investigative Reporters and Editors in 2019. In 2021, she was selected to participate in the IRE Diversity Fellowship, which she considers a pivotal moment in her career that molded her into the investigative reporter she is today.

Jackman has actively served on the IRE Conference Committee, as well as the IRE Broadcast Track Committee. She has served as a moderator and panelist and has recruited panelists from different races and backgrounds to participate in IRE, helping to cover a wide range of issues that impact marginalized communities.

She also is a member of the NABJ Investigative Task Force and active speaker for the National Press Foundation’s Widening the Pipeline Fellowship, and seeks to help bridge the connection with other organizations to promote the goals of IRE and work with them to increase the number of investigative journalists of color among our ranks.

One of Jackman's goals is to start an investigative reporting workshop at middle and high schools in low and middle income communities.

She holds two bachelor's degrees from the University of Georgia and has won numerous awards for her work, including a national Edward R. Murrow Award, Emmys and regional Murrow awards, among others.

Andy Lehren is director of investigative reporting at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism, one of the most diverse, affordable journalism schools in America. He is dedicated to diversity. Lessons from IRE show in the work of his students; his class has won IRE student investigations awards.
Previously, Lehren was senior editor at NBC News Investigations, working on national and international investigations. Prior to that, he was an award-winning investigative reporter and data journalist at The New York Times for more than 12 years and an investigative producer at NBC News for eight years, specializing in data journalism and long-form documentaries.

Lehren's 40-plus awards include: Pulitzer Prize finalist collaboration, IRE, Murrow, Columbia University-duPont, Polk, Peabody, Overseas Press Club, Daniel Pearl, National Press Club, Scripps awards and Loeb.

Paroma Soni is a data and graphics reporter for POLITICO in New York, where she covers trade policy, agriculture and immigration for professional audiences. She was previously an associate visual journalist with FiveThirtyEight, where she worked on several graphics-driven investigations into election denial, abortion access and economic policy. She was a Delacorte Fellow at Columbia Journalism Review, where she investigated online censorship and press freedom in India as well as the systemic murder of journalists in Mexico – both long-form data projects that were named finalists for the SAJA Awards. She has contributed to many other publications, including The Markup's "Still Loading" series on internet speed disparity which won several awards, including the IRE Philip Myer Award, the 2023 Sigma Award and four SABEW awards. She has also been a video producer at BuzzFeed India in Mumbai, where she was born and raised. She has a master's degree in data journalism from Columbia University.

Marina Villeneuve is an investigative journalist for The Hechinger Report based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2023, she graduated from Columbia University's Lede Program in data journalism and was a USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism National Fellow for a broadcast series she led on sexual abuse in Massachusetts public schools. She worked for six years as a statehouse reporter for The Associated Press in Maine and New York.