Joel Ebert covered politics in Illinois, South Dakota and West Virginia before coming to The Tennessean to report on the state’s General Assembly in 2016. The year before, he helped provide daily coverage of the trial of former Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship, who became the first chief executive of a major corporation convicted of a workplace safety crime. A graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, Ebert is a student of Chicago politics whose work has been cited by national media. He’s received awards from the press associations in South Dakota, West Virginia and Tennessee, including the Malcolm Law Award for investigative reporting. In 2019, he was a National Press Foundation fellow.