Undercover Reporting

Reporters have worked as guards or gotten themselves arrested -- sometimes with the aid of authorities and sometimes without -- to investigate conditions inside prisons and jails.

One of a number of high-impact undercover investigations undertaken by the New York World Telegram & Sun in the 1960s, including Woody Klein's worst tenement series, Dale Wright's migrant workers series, and George N. Allen's Undercover Teacher. Mok's series won the prestigious Albert Lasker Medical Journalism Award and the Heywood Broun Memorial Award.

Frank Smith's series, under the editorship of Louis Ruppel at the Chicago Daily Times, got national attention and was, according to Time, a real circulation-builder for the newspaper.

Bly was one of the most visible and attention-getting exponents of undercover reporting -- "stunt" or "detective" reporting, as this precursor of full-scale investigative work was known in her day -- though by no means the first or the only.

One of the best-remembered undercover investigations of all time. Nellie Bly feigns insanity to get herself committed to the Women's Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell's (now Roosevelt) Island.

A gathering of the undercover and experiential reporting of Elizabeth Cochrane, later Seaman, who wrote under the pen name of Nellie Bly.

 Reporter efforts to get inside the world of lobbyists, both on Capitol Hill and in the statehouses.