Alison Fitzgerald
Alison Fitzgerald is an award-winning American journalist for the Center for Public Integrity based in Washington, DC. She previously worked at Bloomberg News for 10 years as a financial reporter.[1] She is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, one of journalism's most prestigious honors.
Ms. Fitzgerald attended high school at Milton Academy in Milton Massachusetts, spending her junior year abroad in France. In her senior year she missed several months of classes due to a bout with leukemia (AML) but succeeded in graduating on schedule with her class after receiving aggressive, newly developed treatment at the Tufts Medical Center Floating Hospital. She attended Georgetown University, graduating with majors in Italian and European Studies, and the Northwestern University - The Medill School of Journalism, with specialties in legal and science writing. She also attended the Università degli Studi di Siena in Siena, Tuscany, and is fluent in English, French, and Italian.
She began her journalism career at the Boston Phoenix before moving to The Philadelphia Inquirer as a general assignment reporter, followed by a three-year stint at The Palm Beach Post. She next moved to become international editor at the Associated Press World Desk in New York.
In 2000 Ms. Fitzgerald joined Bloomberg News to report on a wide variety of financial and business subjects, including the U.S auto industry, the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, economics and tax policy, winning several prestigious journalism awards. In 2008 she broke the Sir Allen Stanford ponzi scheme story after three years of investigation.
Ms. Fitzgerald was awarded the Overseas Press Club's Malcolm Forbes Award for her coverage of the international food price crisis in 2008 in a special 7-part series, Recipe For Famine. Her coverage of the Global Financial Crisis and the ensuing government bailout won her several awards, including the 2009 George Polk Award for National Reporting with her Bloomberg colleagues Mark Pittman, Craig Torres, and Bob Ivry for their work entitled "Fed Defies Transparency Aim in Refusal to Identify Bank Loan". That project also resulted in Bloomberg L.P.'s ground-breaking lawsuit against the Federal Reserve after the central bank refused to disclose how taxpayer funds were used in the bailout of banks. Ms. Fitzgerald and the same team of Bloomberg colleagues were also named as finalists for The Gerald R. Loeb Award. In 2010 the four Bloomberg journalists were awarded the The Hillman Prize for newspaper journalism for their article "The Fight For Transparency".
In 2010, Ms. Fitzgerald and her Bloomberg colleagues Mark Pittman, Bob Ivry, and Christine Harper were awarded the “Best of the Best” Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) in Projects for their Lehman's Lessons package that showed what led to the financial markets crash. In 2011, Ms. Fitzgerald was awarded the Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress.
In 2014, Ms. Fitzgerald received her second George Polk Award for her reporting at the CPI on the fates of high-level financial and banking executives responsible for the Global Financial Crisis.
She is the co-author, with Stanley Reed, of the definitive book In Too Deep: BP and the Drilling Race that Brought it Down, the story of BP's devastating oil well explosion and spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Ms. Fitzgerald sits on the Board of Governors of the National Press Club and is past Chairwoman of the Capital City Symphony in Washington, D.C.
Ms. Fitzgerald is married to Drew Kodjak. They have three children and live in Takoma Park, Maryland.
Awards
- 2008 Malcolm Forbes Award - Overseas Press Club
- 2009 George Polk Award
- 2009 Gerald Loeb Award[2] Finalist
- 2010 Hillman Prize[3]
- 2011 Everett McKinley Dirksen Award for Distinguished Reporting of Congress
- 2011 Best of the Best Award - Society of American Business Editors & Writers
- 2014 George Polk Award