Since 2013, IRW has had a partnership with The Washington Post in which graduate students work as researchers and reporters on major stories, including its coverage of the causes, costs and aftermath of the January 6 United States Capitol attack.
IRW has continued coverage of fatal shootings by police with The Washington Post, as well as contributing to a series of stories about the NFL blocking the rise of Black coaches.
Productions include "Flying Cheap" a documentary about the impact of the major carriers’ reliance on regional airlines and their pilots, which won a Screen Actors Guild Award for writing; a follow-up, “Flying Cheaper,” a follow-up about the impact of outsourcing maintenance on planes; and “Lost in Detention,” a documentary that chronicled the administration’s enforcement policy, which has deported 400,000 people annually the last two years and put thousands in detention centers with legal representation, often splitting up families in which the children are U.S. citizens.
John Sullivan leads a significant long-term partnership with The Washington Post resulting in ongoing, hands-on opportunities for IRW students that has helped drive complex, high-impact investigations such as The Attack (the centerpiece of the Post's 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning public service coverage), Murder with Impunity (a Pulitzer finalist), and Fatal Force (a log of every fatal shooting by an on-duty police officer in the U.S. since 2015).
Intensive, hands-on efforts of IRW and practicum students allow substantive data research that answers questions on inequity and abuse of power in America.
“The Healthcare Divide",[7] the most recent of many collaborations over the years among veteran FRONTLINE writer-producer Rick Young and his team, NPR and the Investigative Reporting Workshop, was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Business, Consumer or Economic coverage.
The program, which aired in 2021, looked at disparities in American health care and the large urban hospitals hit hard by the pandemic.
Reporters traveled across the country over four months to examine the market forces and uneven government support that were deepening the problems.
“Trump’s Trade War,” a FRONTLINE-NPR collaboration in association with IRW, is the 2020 winner of the Morton Frank Award from the Overseas Press Club for best international business news reporting in TV, video, radio, audio or podcast.
But residents in some majority-African American neighborhoods say that trying to get those guns off the street has led to overly aggressive police tactics, including being unfairly targeted for stop-and-frisks.