The Center for Investigative Reporting is one of America’s most storied and trusted nonprofit multimedia news organizations, providing in-depth reporting across every platform where people get their news, from our websites and social media to video, radio, podcast, and print.
Thanks to generous readers and listeners, CIR’s brands are known for award-winning journalism that has influenced public policy and national opinion for nearly five decades.
It produces the magazine and online site Mother Jones, the public radio show and podcast Reveal, the podcast More To The Story With Al Letson, and CIR Studios, which creates documentary films and news segments. Combined, they reach millions of people each month who are eager to get trustworthy news and information.
CIR began as two news outlets with a long, interwoven history. Mother Jones started as a print magazine in 1976 in San Francisco, and grew into a multimedia organization with a large social media and digital audience. Its name is inspired by the labor activist Mary Harris Jones, also known as Mother Jones, who organized workers during the Industrial Revolution in the United States. The Center for Investigative Reporting launched its newsroom in 1977 in Oakland, and in 2013 started the Reveal radio show as a pilot project.
CIR and Mother Jones frequently produced joint reporting projects over the years, and Mother Jones and the legacy CIR organization merged in 2024. The new parent organization operates under the name the Center for Investigative Reporting, and is based in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Washington, DC.
The organization has won several prestigious awards, including being named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize six times: in 2025 for an investigation with the Center for Public Integrity about a government program that gave—and then took away—land to more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people after the Civil War; in 2020 for a report about Amazon warehouse employees; in 2019 for an investigation about housing discrimination by the banking system; in 2018 for exposing a drug rehabilitation program at poultry plants; in 2013, with its California Watch project, for a report about violence in homes for developmentally disabled people; and in 2012, also with California Watch, for a probe about California public schools’ lack of earthquake protections.