Pamela Dempsey

Pam Dempsey is the executive director of the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, an online nonprofit news site based in Champaign, Illinois, covering investigative, data-driven and enterprise reporting of big agribusiness and related issues. She is an award-winning journalist who has done investigative reporting and editing on topics including agribusiness, migrant farm workers, health, housing and Native American government for online, print and radio. Dempsey has also developed community engagement programs and investigative reporting workshops. She also has helped coordinate the start-up of two online newsrooms that heavily emphasize data journalism. In 2017, she was selected as a Reynolds Institute Journalism Fellow to co-lead a team of data journalists and computer scientists with Brant Houston, Professor and Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, to develop a "freemium" model of a digital tool to better identify issues of



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