Joanne Faryon

Joanne Faryon is an award-winning investigative journalist, producer and podcaster. She specializes in long-form, investigative multimedia projects. She has reported in Canada and the U.S. for both regional and national news outlets. Faryon teaches reporting and Shoe Leather: An Investigative Podcast.

Faryon’s work has been published and broadcast in the Los Angeles Times, The National Post, CBC National Radio News, CBC TV’s The National, CBC Newsworld, the PBS NewsHour, NPR and across public media stations in California.

Faryon is the creator and host of the investigative podcast "Room 20," a production of the LA Times Studios. It’s the story of an undocumented migrant who spent 15 years on life support in a California nursing home, unconscious and unidentified. It debuted in the U.S. and Canada at number one on the Apple podcast charts and remained at the top of the charts for weeks. She is the story editor of a new hit podcast released by Warner Media about the life and work of renowned film director Peter Bogdanovich. Faryon is currently working with Warner on a podcast about the life of Lucille Ball.

In her project, "Impossible Choice," Faryon exposed California’s “vent farms” – special nursing home units where thousands of people spend years on life support. In her documentary, "Life in Prison: The Cost of Punishment," she went inside three California prisons to document how sentencing laws contribute to an aging, sick, and expensive prison population. She chronicled the final weeks of an 89-year-old man dying of heart disease when examining why one of the country’s most respected hospices was being investigated for Medicare fraud. She was the first journalist to report on immunized people getting sick with whooping cough during the 2010 California epidemic and raise questions about the efficacy of the vaccine. Her documentary, "When Immunity Fails: The Whooping Cough Epidemic," was the result of an international partnership with KPBS, inewsource.org, and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.

Faryon’s work has been awarded Columbia’s Meyer Berger Award for in-depth human interest reporting and an Investigative Reporters and Editors first place in the multi-platform category. She has been honored with nine Edward R. Murrow awards, two Emmys, a Golden Mike for investigative reporting and has twice received a National Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. Her work has also been recognized by USC’s Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in television political journalism, the Webby Awards, the Podcast Academy and by the Manitoba Human Rights Commission for Meritorious Service for continued coverage on the extreme right and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada.