Brendan McCarthy

Brendan McCarthy is the Globe’s Spotlight editor, overseeing both the Spotlight Team and the newsroom’s data team.

He recently led the Spotlight investigation into Steward Health Care, coverage that received several national honors and was named a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

As deputy projects editor, he shepherded the Globe's “Blind Spot” series, which exposed the government’s failure to monitor the country’s most dangerous drivers and led to several reforms. The series won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

Before joining the Globe in 2018, McCarthy was the founding editor of the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit affiliated with the state’s public radio network. During his tenure, the startup produced a Peabody Award-winning podcast, along with audio investigations that earned IRE awards and national Edward R. Murrow honors.

As a reporter in New Orleans, McCarthy covered crime and corruption for The Times-Picayune. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2009 and received Columbia University’s Mike Berger Award for an eight-part narrative series about a boy’s unsolved murder. He was also part of a team behind a PBS “Frontline” documentary on New Orleans police abuses, which was honored with a George Polk Award.

McCarthy also worked as an investigative reporter at WWL-TV in New Orleans. He began his career at the Chicago Tribune and has written occasionally about hip-hop and crime for XXL magazine.

His journalism has taken him around the world, from riding in a rodeo in Wisconsin to reporting from remote villages in the Philippines, examining crime in the nation’s murder capital, and chasing hurricanes across the South.

He appeared as himself in the HBO series “Treme” and was featured in Spike Lee’s “If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise.”

A native of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, McCarthy is a graduate of Emerson College.