ProPublica announced that Nicole Lewis has been hired as deputy editor of the engagement reporting team. She starts on March 30.

“We’ve long admired Nicole and her team’s community-driven work at The Marshall Project,” Ariana Tobin, senior editor of engagement and crowdsourcing, said. “She’s a leader and a pioneer in the field, with sharp accountability instincts. She’s going to help our team do so much good journalism.”

Lewis comes to ProPublica from The Marshall Project, where she most recently served as engagement editor. She led a team that reported with and for the many communities affected by the criminal justice system, from crowdsourcing gaps in the federal government’s dataset on deaths in custody to curating a public art exhibition exploring the lingering effects of unsolved homicides in St. Louis. 

As a staff writer, Lewis covered states’ efforts to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions and the experiences of families of the incarcerated. In that role, she led a first-of-its-kind survey on the political affiliations of people behind bars, hearing from more than 64,000 people in prisons and jails across the country. The 2020 survey received an honorable mention from IRE’s Philip Meyer Award for pioneering use of social science research methods.

Lewis got her start as an editor at Slate, where she led the jurisprudence team covering the Supreme Court, law and politics. Her career also includes reporting at The Washington Post, The Hechinger Report and The GroundTruth Project. With support from a Reynolds Journalism Institute grant, she co-founded Audacity Media Lab, which provides resources for journalists to produce work with real-world impact. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Mother Jones and The Guardian and has received numerous accolades, including being recognized as a finalist for the National Magazine Awards in both community journalism and illustrated features.

“ProPublica has been on the cutting edge of engagement reporting for years,” Lewis said. “I am so excited to join the team and support a group of incredibly talented reporters to uncover how communities across the country are dealing with some of the most pressing issues of our time.”