Ian
Urbina

NBC News

The Whistleblower

An American took his dream job in India. What he found was something else entirely.

The New Yorker

A Fleet Prone to Captive Labor and Plunder

China has expanded an armada of far-flung fishing vessels. And this has come at a grave human toll.

The New Yorker

The Uyghurs Forced to Process the World’s Fish

China forces minorities from Xinjiang to work in industries around the country. As it turns out, this includes processing much of the seafood sent to America and Europe.

The New Yorker

The North Koreans Behind Global Seafood

China uses thousands of workers from the Hermit Kingdom, in violation of U.N. sanctions and U.S. law. Many at the plants recounted rampant sexual abuse.

The New Yorker

Fish Farming is Feeding the Globe. What’s the Cost for Locals?

In the small coastal African country of Gambia, an exploding industry to produce a lucrative high-protein powder called fishmeal has led to big economic promises, and a steep environmental price. Nearly half of all fish pulled from the sea globally is not used for human consumption but instead is ground up, dried and fed as powder or pellets to livestock, most especially farmed fish. This piece explores the surprising way that fish farming - or aquaculture - which was meant to slow the amount of fish being pulled from the ocean has actually accelerated it.

The New York Times Magazine

The Secret Life of Passwords

We despise them – yet we imbue them with our hopes and dreams, our dearest memories, our deepest meanings. Turns out, passwords unlock much more than our accounts. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — many of our most prized passwords are also mental tchotchkes that carry our inner lives forward. Urbina spent 5 years convincing people to tell him their passwords and the rich stories hidden within many of them.

The New York Times

Using Jailed Migrants as a Pool of Cheap Labor

This story revealed that the largest employer of undocumented immigrants in America is the U.S. government. As the federal government cracked down on immigrants where were in the country illegally and penalized businesses that hired them, the federal prison system employs tens of thousands of those same undocumented immigrants each year.

Vanity Fair

Get Kony

This piece is a deep profile of Sam Childers, a former Hell's Angel and gun runner, turned born-again Christian preacher, who joined the guerrilla fighters in South Sudan. Urbina traveled with Childers, after he was ostensibly hired to kill a brutal warlord named Joseph Kony, leader of a group called the Lord's Resistance Army. In 2011, Childers' life story became the basis of a movie called Machine Gun Preacher, starring Gerard Butler.

The New York Times

Piles of Dirty Secrets Behind a Model ‘Clean Coal’ Project

This investigation exposed worker safety and financial problems with a 20-billion-dollar project to build a plant in Kemper Mississippi that was supposed to be able to affordably convert coal into natural gas. A huge recipient of tax subsidies, the project was a centerpiece of President Obama’s climate plan even though it was plagued by problems that managers tried to conceal. The published story contributed to a federal investigation and the ultimate dismantling of the plant.

The Atlantic

The Capricious Use of Solitary Confinement Against Detained Immigrants

Based on hundreds of thousands of pages of documents acquired via open-records requests and a whistle-blower, this investigation uncovered how the Obama and Trump administrations used solitary in ways that critics say are arbitrary, cruel, and in violation of federal rules.

The New Yorker

The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe

Hoping to stop migrants arriving from Africa, the E.U. created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias. The story was published in more than 50 venues in 11 countries and led to outcry from the UN officials, human rights advocates and parliamentarians. While reporting the piece in Tripoli, Urbina was taken captive and violently abused by a militia.

The New York Times

Drilling Down (A Series)

This 11-part series exposed the environmental, worker safety, and financial risks of fracking, a drilling technique driving the U.S. oil and gas boom. Among its many findings, the series revealed that, with little oversight, oil and gas companies were routinely sending highly radioactive drilling waste to sewage plants that were unequipped to treat it before it was discharged into rivers, sometimes less than a mile upstream from drinking-water intake plants. Municipal authorities were routinely using contaminated drilling waste to de-ice roads in winter and suppress dust in summer, sending millions of gallons of contaminated runoff into rivers. Senior E.P.A. officials bowed to political pressure and blocked research on some of the gas industry’s most hazardous practices. The focus of six Congressional hearings, the reporting also contributed to investigations of the fracking industry by the S.E.C., the New York Attorney General and the G.A.O.. The reporting won an award from The Society for Business Journalists, was the focus of an episode on Stephan Colbert’s show and became the basis for a Matt Damon and John Krasinski movie, Promised Land.

The New York Times

For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews

This story investigated so-called “mag crews” – traveling groups of teenagers, many of them runaways or from broken homes, who sell magazine subscriptions. It revealed an otherwise hidden industry prone to debt bondage, drug use and violence. The piece was adapted into the 2016 movie, American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold and starring Shia LaBeouf.

The New York Times

Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials

The piece revealed a proposed federal plan to use prisoners as test subjects for pharmaceutical drug trials, dredging up a painful history of medical mistreatment of inmates. After the story, the proposal was canceled.

The New York Times

In the Treatment of Diabetes, Success Often Does Not Pay

Urbina was a member of the team of reporters that wrote a series about diabetes. Urbina’s story focused on the upside-nature of American health care and how insurance often pays to counter symptoms but not the causes of chronic diseases. The series, called Bad Blood, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and received a public service award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ New York City chapter and a Society of Silurians award for science health reporting.

Harper’s Magazine

Stars and Stripes

This piece revealed that the U.S. Department of Defense uses federal prison inmates, including convicted terrorists, to work in factories producing everything from soldier uniforms and helmets to missile parts and parachutes.

The New York Times

The Outlaw Ocean (Series)

Seven of the stories in this series about lawlessness at sea were featured on the front page of The New York Times. An eighth piece ran in the New York Times Magazine. The series led to multiple arrests of captains for slavery and murder. It led to litigation against seafood companies and spurred corporate and government policy reforms. It also resulted in Congressional and State Department testimony. The reporting was awarded a half dozen awards and was optioned for film by Leonardo DiCaprio. Eventually it was the basis for a subsequent best-selling book and the founding of a journalism non-profit organization by the same name.

The Atlantic

Purgatory at Sea

Off the coast of Italy, cruise ships are being repurposed as holding pens for migrants rescued from the Mediterranean.

The Washington Post

A Slaughter At Sea, A Grainy Video And Justice Delayed

Among the investigations covered in The Outlaw Ocean book is that of the Murder at Sea story, which reveals a slow-motion slaughter of at least four men caught on camera. The grainy video began circulating in 2013 and the original investigation was published by The Outlaw Ocean in The New York Times in 2015. In late August, 2020, the man shouting on camera and suspected to have ordered these killings was arrested in Taiwan.

NBC News

The Deadly Presence of China’s Invisible Armada

This piece revealed the largest fleet of illegal fishing ships ever discovered: more than 900 Chinese ships in North Korean waters in violation of U.N. sanctions that China had signed. These ships had played a role in desperate North Korean fishermen dying and washing ashore. The story won a Sigma Award and led to meetings at the UN and a sudden withdrawal of these ships.