Charles Maldonado
Charles Maldonado

Veteran New Orleans journalist Charles Maldonado is the managing editor of Verite with a focus on investigations, data reporting and public records access.

He comes to Verite from The Lens, an award-winning nonprofit investigative news website founded in New Orleans in 2009. Charles worked at The Lens for more than nine years, serving as a reporter and editor. 

As a staff writer at The Lens, he reported on New Orleans city government and criminal justice. His 2017 series on the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office’s use of fraudulent witness subpoenas resulted in the end of the practice — which had been in use by area prosecutors for decades — as well as a major federal civil rights suit filed by the ACLU and the Civil Rights Corps.

As the Lens’ editor, Charles oversaw investigative projects on corruption and mismanagement in New Orleans schools, the expansion of police surveillance in the city and the ongoing impacts of Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury law years after it was repealed. 

Charles previously worked as a reporter at Gambit, the New Orleans alternative newsweekly, and newspapers in Tennessee, New York and his hometown of Detroit, Michigan.

He joins a growing staff at Verite, a Black-led nonprofit news organization with a twofold mission to produce in-depth journalism that serves the whole community while training, educating and mentoring a new generation of minority journalists.

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