Brian Howey is an award-winning reporter who has covered everything from policing to wedgefish. He has published work in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, the Los Angeles Times and various other national, regional and local publications. Howey currently works as a New York Times Local Investigations Fellow with Mississippi Today, where he focuses on criminal justice and policing issues. He earned his master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he studied investigative reporting and narrative writing.
Awards
Howey won a George Polk Award in the Justice Reporting category for his two-part exposé of a controversial police interview tactic popularized by one of the nation’s largest developers of law enforcement policy manuals. He published the stories in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Program, the Los Angeles Times and Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting. His Los Angeles Times story also won a Sacramento Press Club Journalism Award.
Howey was part of the team that was one of six finalists for the 2024 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for the team’s reporting on Mississippi sheriffs for Mississippi Today and The New York Times.
In 2020, Howey won the Society of Professional Journalists, NorCal Excellence in Journalism Award in Print/Online Small Division for his coverage of San Francisco’s response to homelessness during the pandemic.
He was also the producer on the team that won 3rd place at the 2020 Best of the West journalism awards, Audio Storytelling category, for Force of Law, a podcast by CalMatters and StudioToBe about police shootings in California and the lawmakers who tried to pass the nation’s strictest police use of force standard.