Senior Fellow
Laurie Becklund is an award-winning bilingual Los Angeles journalist, author, integrated media project developer, and CCLP Senior Fellow.
She has a 25-year career as a journalist, most of that time as a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times.
She conducted award-winning team investigations into malfeasance and gross negligence at the Los Angeles County Coroner-Medical Examiner; the toxic poisoning of thousands of Mexican “canal people” whose health mattered less than the tomatoes they picked for U.S. export; prominent LA businessmen who secretly owned slums in the name of their pets; and outrageous sexual harassment by media moguls that led to resignations and industry change; Salvadoran death squads based on interviews with death squad members and their own archives. She was a key writer on the Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for riot coverage.
Leaving print to explore other media, she covered the OJ Simpson case for CBS NEWS, and developed a series of pioneering Internet projects with the support of news organizations and as a consultant to Sun Microsystems, MCI, and Annenberg. Associated Student Press, a model nonprofit she started as a hyper-local news model nationwide, produced one of the first Internet news organizations to cover a political convention.
She is also coauthor of four best-selling books, including SWOOSH, The Story of Nike and the Men who Played There (with J.B. Strasser), and Between Two Worlds, Escape from Tyranny (with Zainab Salbi), and has been widely interviewed about her work. She has reported from Iraq, China, Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Chile, Portugal, Ethiopia, Europe, and throughout the United States. She also shares a copywriter on Web-based content management software.
Her current interests include: public air and street rights, patient-created health databases, and working with developers to create applications that enhance metropolitan living. Favorite still under-utilized tool: GPS. Favorite under-developed medium: radio.