Award-winning Reporter Tapped into her Tenacity at SDSU
Wendy Halloran won the coveted duPont Award for investigative reporting.
That could be her lineage talking. Halloran’s grandfather was Reno city attorney, district attorney in northern Nevada’s Washoe County and president of the State Bar of Nevada.
She was on a career path to that same profession as a criminal justice major at San Diego State University, but after graduating in 1991, Halloran took a slight turn. She completed the broadcast journalism program at the University of Nevada-Reno and decided to combat injustice as a television reporter.
“I’m passionate about the rights of victims, and I’m mindful of the role the media plays in the justice system,” said Halloran, currently a chief investigative reporter in Arizona.
In 2015, Halloran and a KPNX 12 news team in Phoenix won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for investigative journalism, among the most prestigious awards in the field of broadcast journalism.
Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism called Halloran’s work a “probing, relentless investigation into the Phoenix Fire Department’s arson squad.” In a series of reports compiled over two years and comprising interviews with dozens of officials and private citizens, Halloran found that the city unjustly prosecuted at least four innocent people as a result of the arson squad’s uncorroborated accusations against them.
Halloran successfully refuted claims that Phoenix had the highest rate of arson clearance of any major U.S. city fire department, claims mostly based on one dog handler’s assertion that his animal was infallible at arson detection. Her reporting also led to an FBI investigation of the department and a state police criminal investigation, which resulted in the recommendation of criminal charges against the discredited arson investigators. They were removed from the arson unit, and the fire chief resigned.
Since then, she’s reported several other consequential stories. One detailed how missteps by police in Tempe, Arizona, may have allowed an accused murder to remain free and allegedly commit a second (of which he was convicted after Halloran’s story).
A second investigative report describes incidents of student bullying by two faculty members at Scottsdale Community College—behavior that may have precipitated the student’s suicide days before graduation. Without admitting guilt, the college issued a degree to the student posthumously.
Halloran credits her SDSU experience with instilling in her the knowledge, persistence and grit to become an investigative reporter.
“It was a really robust education,” Halloran said. “We studied the entire criminal justice system and I also completed an internship with the Victims of Violent Crime Unit in the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office in Chula Vista. The degree was tough, and it prepared me for my career. I’ve been successful because of San Diego State.”
