Undercover Reporting

Journalists have devised any number of ruses to get inside hospitals and clinics --  as patients or staff members.

Jack London's first-hand account of life in London's East End, sleeping on the street or in work houses some of the time.

Reporter Woody Klein spends a month living in a New York City slum for a New York World Telegram & Sun series in 1959.

Reporter Dale Wright spent six months working on and off as a migrant worker along the Atlantic Seaboard for this series, which examines the conditions, exploitation, and legislation (and its effectiveness) of migrant laborer life.  ("The Forgotten People..A Report on Migrant Labor" by Dale Wright. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Dale Wright, c/o K.E. Wright-King ©1961, New York World-Telegram and Sun.)

Washington Post reporter Neil Henry lived for two months as a bum in Baltimore then Washington D.C.. The series, titled "Down & Out," is written in the first person and consists of profiles of the people and places he encountered and accounts of the daily routines of the homeless.

Ray Sprigle, a white reporter from Pittsburgh, goes undercover as a light-skinned black man in the deep south. 

Conover spent four months living as a tramp, riding the rails, which ultimately became his first book, Rolling Nowhere. Research for the project began for his senior thesis, while still an undergrad at Amherst College, which has awarded him an honorary degree.

Journalists who infiltrated U.S.-based Nazi bunds, the Ku Klux Klan, the Gomorrah, and other secret societies and closed groups.

Ted Conover's work revolves around immersion forays into a variety of subject areas, including America's hoboes, illegal immigration, prisons, Aspen, Colorado, and on the world's iconic roads.