I-Comm Week - Speaker Bio

Mitch Weiss
2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner
Associated Press Correspondent - Charlotte

Mitch Weiss, a winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, is The Associated Press correspondent in Charlotte, where he covers breaking and national news and projects.

Before joining The AP in 2008, Weiss worked for the Charlotte Observer as the deputy business editor, where he helped produce strong watchdog journalism. He launched a series that brought home the problems National Guard soldiers encounter when returning to civilian life and was instrumental producing an award-winning immigration series in 2006.

Weiss also launched and led the newspaper's investigation of the poultry industry. That series led to congressional hearings, to be held in early April. The project also is featured in an upcoming episode of the PBS television show Expose.

Before joining the Observer in 2005, Weiss worked at The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, as the paper's state editor. Weiss and Blade reporter Michael D. Allah wrote in 2003 about an elite Army platoon that killed hundreds of civilians in Vietnam's central highlands in 1967.

The project detailed how the government spent years investigating the Tiger Force atrocities, substantiating more 20 war crimes involving 18 soldiers, but then buried the case in 1975. No one was prosecuted. Weiss and Allah won the Pulitzer Prize for the series. They turned the series into a critically acclaimed book for Little, Brown & Company. The book, released in May, 2006, made the Top 10 list of more than a dozen newspapers, including The Washington Post, Miami Herald and San Francisco Chronicle. The paperback was released in June 2007. Prior to his time at The Blade, Weiss was an AP reporter based in Columbus, Ohio, and later correspondent in Toledo.

Weiss graduated from Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York, and has a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Mitch Weiss