Brant Houston is the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign where he teaches investigative and advanced reporting. He is the coauthor of “The Investigative Reporter’s Handbook” and author of “Computer-Assisted Reporting: A Practical Guide.” Houston is chair of the board of directors of the Investigative News Network, a consortium of more than 50 nonprofit newsrooms in North America, and a co-founder of the Global Investigative Journalism Network.
He also is board president of the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism and serves on several other nonprofit journalism boards. Before becoming the Knight Chair, Houston was executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (NICAR) for 12 years. Houston was an investigative journalist for 17 years before he joined IRE and won awards while at The Hartford Courant and at The Kansas City Star where he was part of the newsroom staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of a hotel building collapse that killed 114 persons in 1981.