Prior to working forThe New York Times, he spent five years each atThe Washington Post, theHartford Courant, and the first two years of his newspaper career at theValley News inLebanon, New Hampshire. Lipton is a 1987 graduate of theUniversity of Vermont where he received a BA in philosophy and history as well as working atThe Vermont Cynic.[1]
In 2018, he and a group of other New York Times reporters won theJohn B. Oakes Award for Environmental Reporting from Columbia University for a series of stories about the Trump administration's effort to rollback environmental protections.[2]
In 2017, he was part of a team of 11 reporters atThe Times awarded thePulitzer Prize for International Reporting[3] for its coverage on Russia's covert projection of power, including the story examining Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.[4][5]
One of the three stories in the series about state attorneys general focused onScott Pruitt, then theAttorney General of Oklahoma, detailing for the first time the secretive alliance Pruitt had with oil and gas companies and other energy producers. These companies were sending tens of millions of dollars to the Republican Attorneys General Association that Pruitt helped run at the same time as Pruitt was helping the companies fight Obama-era environmental regulations, by suing to block these rules in federal court at least 14 times.[9][10] Lipton found that Pruitt had taken draft letters written by the energy companies, put them on his state government stationery and sent them in to officials in Washington.[11] When Pruitt was later nominated to serve as the head of theEnvironmental Protection Agency under President Trump, this story became a central focus of his confirmation hearing.[12]
In 1992, he won aPulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism, at the age of 26, for a series of stories he co-authored at theHartford Courant on theHubble Space Telescope withRobert S. Capers.[13] The stories examined the team of scientists who built the main mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope, considered one of the most complex scientific devices at the time of its launch. Facing financial pressures and other challenges, the team built a misshapen main mirror for the space telescope, a flaw that was ultimately corrected but caused embarrassment and questions about the status of United States space science.
In 2021, stories Lipton and other reporters from The New York Times wrote over the prior year about "how the Trump administration consistently failed to respond properly or adequately to the coronavirus threat, including downplaying its seriousness," were named as a Pulitzer Prize finalist in National Reporting.[14]
Lipton was also a finalist in 1999 for theLivingston Award for young journalists while working as a reporter atThe Washington Post, for a series of stories examining the trash industry in New York City, which then shipped most of its waste via truck to landfills in Virginia.[15][16] In 2008, he was the recipient of an honorary degree from theUniversity of Vermont.[17]
Lipton spent months after the September 2001 attacks covering the aftermath of the attacks on New York, writing a series of stories forThe New York Times and its "Nation Challenged" section about the efforts to recover and identify human remains from the site and to clear the World Trade Center site of the debris left after the attack. Those stories, co-written withJames Glanz ofThe New York Times, were part of a package that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.[18]
A story inThe New York Times Magazine he co-wrote with James Glanz, which appeared on the first anniversary of the attacks, examined the history of the trade center towers. That story was the basis for a book he would co-author with James Glanz, published in 2003,City in the Sky, the Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center,[19] which examined the conception, design, construction, life and ultimate destruction of the twin towers, tracing the story back to the 1950s when the project was first proposed byDavid Rockefeller. A second story, titled "Fighting to Live as the Towers Died", examined the fate of the unlucky individuals who were stuck above the point of impact in the two towers after the planes hit, a piece based on hundreds of hours of work collecting random emails, text messages and recollections of phone calls with those victims, all of which were assembled into a single narrative. That story formed the basis of a 2004 book called102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, written byJim Dwyer andKevin Flynn, who were co-authors on the originalNew York Times story.
Archival materials from the Lipton and Glanz research effort—the most comprehensive history ever written about the World Trade Center—are now maintained at theNew York Public Library.[20] The materials are separated into five chronological categories: Conception (1945–1970), Construction (1966–1973), Life in the Towers (1972–2001), 9/11, and Post 9/11 (2001–2003) The research was also featured in an episode of the documentary seriesAmerican Experience, "New York: The Center of the World".
Lipton was among the first reporters to be assigned to cover the Department of Homeland Security full-time. He started shortly after it was created, writing stories that examined the challenges associated with the largest change in federal bureaucracy sinceHarry S. Truman was president, and chronicling the agency's struggle as it spent billions of dollars on flawed airport security screening equipment and ships for theCoast Guard.[21][22] His assignment ended up taking him to disaster zones around the world, including weeks spend in Mississippi and Louisiana in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, examining flaws in the government response and waste and fraud in hurricane aid.[23][24] He was also sent in December 2004 toBanda Aceh, along with a team of reporters fromThe New York Times, to cover theearthquake and tsunami there that killed more than 150,000.[25]
Lipton has been part of a collection of reporters atThe Times who have examined the business operations ofThe Trump Organization as Donald J. Trump moved to theWhite House. He has detailed the potential for conflicts of interest, includingTrump Hotel in Washington D.C.,[26] and Trump operations in the Philippines, Turkey, India, Brazil,[27] Indonesia, Dubai, Vancouver, and other stops. He also looked at how theTrump family took steps to attempt to address some of the issues covered in these stories. Lipton has also written pieces about the arrival within the Trump administration of former lobbyists, corporate lawyers and corporate executives, likeCarl Icahn, who have taken up issues with their new powers that may benefit their holdings or past business partners.During the Trump administration, Lipton's coverage focused on environmental consequences of regulatory rollbacks made at the Environmental Protection Agency[28] and the Interior Department[29] and how tax cuts that President Trump championed benefitted some of his wealthy friends.[30] He also spent much of 2020 covering the coronavirus outbreak, working with teams of other reporters examining the reasons behind the flawed federal response by the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.[31]
His work has been featured in a number of other documentary films, includingThe Falling Man, by Harry Singer, andWar on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State, a 2013 film examining government whistleblowers.[32] He also served as a consultant to the 2020 documentary film Totally Under Control, which examined the Trump administration response to the coronavirus pandemic.[33]
Previously the Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting, No Edition Time from 1953–1963 and the Pulitzer Prize for Local Investigative Specialized Reporting from 1964–1984
