Founder and Executive Director

Rose Ciotta has spent an award-winning career in local journalism.  She co-edited “Assault on Learning,” an investigation of violence in the Philadelphia schools that won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service for The Philadelphia Inquirer. The project won many other awards including Investigative Reporters & Editors, The Casey Medal and The National Association of Black Journalists. 

She has worked in all platforms including broadcasting and digital. She is a former board member of Investigative Reporters & Editors. She was selected for a John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship to study at Stanford University. 

As an alumna, she was selected in 2017 for a Jim Bettinger News Innovation Fund award which funded a pilot project of Investigative Editing Corps.  She worked with the Olean Times Herald to produce two projects that won statewide awards and the Beaver County Times to produce a multi-media project. 

A graduate of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, Ciotta began her journalism career at a small town daily. She went on to become an award-winning investigative reporter and editor at The Buffalo News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She returned to Buffalo where she joined WIVB-TV, the CBS affiliate where her work won two Edward R. Murrow regional awards. At EdSource, a California-based education news web site, she directed award-winning projects and investigations including a documentary on incarcerated men earning college degrees that won international awards. Most recently, she was a senior investigations editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.