Whistleblowers who’ve reported corporate or government fraud and misconduct
— such as Jim Legg of ConocoPhillips in EXPOSÉ’s “A Sea of Trouble” — have likely
saved thousands of lives. But those who choose to blow the whistle on their
employer face a treacherous path that often results in financial and
emotional ruin. Investigative reporter James Sandler writes about
his own experience working with a company whistleblower during a NEW YORK
TIMES investigation, and offers a few words of advice for those thinking
about making the leap.

> Read “The Whistleblower’s Tightrope” by James Sandler, now a staff reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting. Sandler’s essay appears on the website for EXPOSÉ: America’s Investigative Reports, a PBS series produced by Thirteen/WNET New York in association with CIR.

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Carrie Ching is an award-winning, independent multimedia journalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six years, she led digital storytelling projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting as senior multimedia producer. Her multimedia reports have been featured by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. Her specialty is crafting digital narratives and exploring ways to use video, audio, photography, animation and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web, tablets and mobile. Her work has been honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Best of the West, the Online News Association, Scripps Howard, The Gracies, and was part of the entry in a Pulitzer-finalist project. Prior to her time at CIR she was a magazine and book editor, video journalist, newspaper reporter and TV comedy scriptwriter. She was on the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalists. She completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in 2005.