At a press conference for Senate candidate Harvey Gantt, 1990. Photo by Sadie Bridger.
“He’s taught big-city reporters a thing or two about investigative journalism.”
–Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Barry Yeoman specializes in in-depth reporting that puts a human face on complex issues. During nearly four decades in journalism, he has brought readers and listeners into:
- a training ground for private soldiers on secret missions;
- a lab where the basic assumptions of dinosaur science are being challenged;
- a North Carolina city where police pepper-sprayed voters;
- an Indian coastline where a World Bank-financed project threatens traditional fishing families;
- a seminary where Christian missionaries train to convert Muslims;
- a Native American community whose yards are crumbling into the Gulf of Mexico;
- a New Hampshire town threatening secession from the United States;
- a Turkish bird paradise that could soon be under water;
- a boat operated by two shrimpers trying to cope with the BP oil spill;
- the Washington corridors where a super-lobbyist rose to power before his fall;
- corner blues joints in New Orleans that struggle to keep their doors open; and
- the inside of his own DNA.
He has written about Southern chicken farmers, brain-injured athletes, women veterans, earnest Promise Keepers, civil-rights heroes, an American strategist for the Iraqi resistance, controversial sex researchers, Spanish Carnival musicians, Jews for Jesus, anti-fracking rebels, and the women whose lives are caught up in the debate over “partial birth” abortion.
Covering the events of Oct. 31, 2020, when law-enforcement officers in Graham, North Carolina pepper-sprayed voters marching to the polls. Photo by Devin Lee Vaughn.
Barry’s work has appeared AARP the Magazine, The American Prospect, The Assembly, Audubon, CityLab, Discover, Glamour, Good Housekeeping, The Guardian, HuffPost, Mother Jones, The Nation, National Wildlife, New Republic, O Magazine, onEarth, Parade, Popular Science, Saturday Evening Post, Sunset, Talking Points Memo, Texas Monthly, and The Washington Post. It has been produced in collaboration with journalism non-profits like the International Consortium of Investigative Reporters, Type Investigations, and the Food & Environment Reporting Network. It has been translated into Russian, Portuguese, Khmer, Spanish, Flemish, and Italian.
Barry won the National Magazine Award for Public Interest, the industry’s highest honor, as part of a team that investigated the Southern poultry industry. He won the Green Eyeshade Award, the South’s top journalism prize, for an exposé of North Carolina’s highway-building system. Columbia Journalism Review, the nation’s premiere journalism magazine, named him one of nine investigative reporters who are “out of the spotlight but on the mark.” The Columbia University School of Journalism and Poynter Institute have described Barry’s work as “the essence of excellence.” For a list of awards, see the righthand column of this page.
Interviewing U.S. Rep. Mel Watt at 1992 Democratic National Convention. Photo by Jenny Warburg.
He has produced radio documentaries and podcasts about everything from zydeco music to coastal land loss. He served as the editorial producer for the four-year run of Life Reimagined, a TV segment that aired on the TODAY show and was hosted by Jane Pauley.
Besides doing his own journalism, Barry teaches journalism at Wake Forest University and Duke University.
Click here for Barry’s resume. Click here to read Allison Kirkland’s 2019 interview with Barry, reposted by Harvard’s Nieman Storyboard. Click here to subscribe to Barry’s occasional newsletter.
For this article, Barry tested his own DNA and that of his dog Scooter (2007-2018). Photo by Jared Lazarus, Duke Photography.
