Advisory Council

Chris Adams is a reporter in the McClatchy Washington Bureau, working on national investigations for all of the company’s papers.

He previously worked for the Wall Street Journal and the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune. He has had several beats—education, the steel industry, health care, race relations, the environment—and he has covered everything from a small-town Louisiana sheriff, to the Martha Stewart stock-trading case, to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Adams graduated from Iowa State in 1988, with majors in journalism and political science, and later received a master’s degree in political science from the University of New Orleans. While at ISU, he was editor of the Iowa State Daily and of Ethos magazine. He was awarded the school’s James W. Schwartz Award in 2000.

His reporting has won multiple awards including the George Polk Award, the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, the Worth Bingham Prize, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, the Clark Mollenhoff Award for Investigative Reporting, the National Headliner Award, the Livingston Award, the Scripps Howard Foundation National Journalism Award for Washington Reporting, the SPJ/SDX Award for Washington Reporting, and a Heywood Broun Award.

He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1996 and 1999, and in 2000 was part of a six-person Journal team that won the Pulitzer for stories on Pentagon spending.

Adams also teaches undergraduate reporting courses at the American University School of Communications in Washington.