We are thrilled to announce that Lisa Gartner will be joining The Washington Post as a deputy editor on the long-term investigative team.
Lisa comes to us from the San Francisco Chronicle, where she has served as investigations editor since 2020, overseeing a group of reporters on a string of high-impact, award-winning stories and projects.
In 2022, she edited a devastating examination of San Francisco’s use of taxpayer money to shelter its homeless population in dilapidated and run-down hotels with little oversight and disastrous results. The series, which prompted an overhaul of how the city ran and funded this housing, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting and won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award and the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Investigative Reporting.
In another investigation, Lisa developed a freelancer’s tip into a run of explosive stories that revealed more than a dozen women who said they had been sexually assaulted by a Sonoma County mayor known as a “prince” of Wine Country. Weeks after publication, the mayor resigned. Lisa also edited stories that meticulously documented the questionable deaths of four children in a pediatric critical care unit at a Walnut Creek hospital and an investigation that revealed 551 bystanders had died over six years in high-speed police chases nationwide while the officers involved faced little or no consequences.
Prior to the Chronicle, Lisa was an investigative reporter at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where her 2019 investigation of the nation’s oldest reform school prompted an overhaul of Pennsylvania’s juvenile justice system and was recognized with a George Polk Award for Justice Reporting. As an education reporter at the Tampa Bay Times, Lisa was part of a team that produced “Failure Factories,” a 2015 project that exposed systemic racism in the school system and won the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting.
Editing at The Post will mark a return to D.C. for Lisa, who began her career in 2010 covering education for the Washington Examiner.
Lisa was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Wellington, Fla. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University, where she studied journalism and psychology. She and her husband have a 10-month-old son and two dogs of comically extreme sizes. Lisa loves traveling, hiking and eating good food — she once solo-hiked the Tour du Mont Blanc in Western Europe, a 103-mile route with 10,000 feet of climbing, fueled by cheese, bread and pasta.
Lisa starts on Sept. 3 and will relocate to D.C. later this year.
Please join us in welcoming her to The Post.
