Jonathan M. Katz

Notable work and positions

Associated Press - Former Haiti Bureau Chief
The Racket - Author

Biography

Jonathan Myerson Katz is a journalist and author. He graduated from Northwestern University with a bachelor's degree in history and American studies in 2002 and a master's degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism in 2004. He served as the Associated Press bureau chief in Haiti from 2007 to 2011, and was the only full-time American news correspondent in the country on January 12, 2010, when he survived and provided the first international report of the earthquake that struck that day. That fall, he broke the story that United Nations peacekeepers were the likely source of a post-quake cholera epidemic that has since killed at least 10,000 people; the UN acknowledged its role in 2016. Katz won the Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism (since renamed the James Foley Medal) in 2011 for his Haiti coverage. He left the AP in 2012 and has since contributed regularly to The New York Times, and has also written for The New Republic, Slate, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and other publications. He is the author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster (2013), which won the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award and the WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award, and Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire (2022). He publishes the newsletter The Racket and has been a fellow at Arizona State University's Future of War program and New America.

Career highlights

• Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism 2011 · For his reporting on the 2010 Haiti earthquake and its aftermath.
• The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster 2013 · Winner of the Overseas Press Club of America's Cornelius Ryan Award.
• Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire 2022.