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Topic: Memos Sent to Romenesko
Date/Time: 3/30/2007 6:19:19 PM
Title: Houston resigns as IRE executive director
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
From: "IRE President"
Date: March 30, 2007 4:51:36 PM EDT
To: IRE mailing list
Subject: Letter from IRE Board President, James Grimaldi

Dear IRE Member,

We're writing you today to let you know that the IRE Board is going to start looking for a new executive director.

After a decade as our director and 13 years at the Missouri School of
Journalism, Brant Houston has let us know he intends to accept a great job offer as the endowed Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

We wish Brant the very best, and we're grateful he has agreed to help
through the end of this year to make a smooth transition and finish our
endowment drive. Brant's acceptance of the job is pending approval of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees, but we wanted to let you know as soon as we could that the plan is for him to begin teaching at Illinois in the fall.

He is taking the chair that was endowed by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in 2000 and is currently held by veteran investigative journalist Bill Gaines, who is retiring at the end of this academic year. Brant will teach and work on projects to support and improve investigative journalism.

Under an arrangement with the University of Illinois and the IRE Board, we expect he will serve as a consultant to IRE until Jan. 1, 2008, but the IRE board is taking prompt steps to find a new executive director. We plan to form a transition and search committee to find a leader who can ensure IRE remains the industry's hub of innovation and training for journalists. We will review the management structure of the organization and decide how to fill the significant void he will leave.

We are all sad to see Brant go. No doubt, Brant's tennis shoes are going to be hard to fill - both on the tennis court (many of us know Brant as a
tennis enthusiast) and in the director's office. In leaps and with boundless energy, Brant has helped make IRE the best journalism organization in the world.

At the same time, we could not be more optimistic about IRE's future and the prospects of finding a great new leader. As the world's leading training organization for investigative journalists, IRE is stronger than it has ever been, with more than 4,500 grassroots members from print, broadcast, online and freelance journalism.

With 12 fulltime positions, our outstanding staff puts on more than 60
seminars and training conferences per year and provides members with
efficient, state-of-the-art service, training, resources, publications and
databases.

Brant will leave us with strong funders who have enabled us to sustain a
budget of more than $1.4 million and an endowment drive that tops $3
million. As we noted, Brant will continue to work with us to achieve our
goal of $5 million for the endowment.

Brant has told us he is eager to collaborate with IRE in his new role as
Knight chair. In the meantime, he will continue to oversee and be deeply
involved in IRE's annual conference in June in Phoenix, where IRE will
commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Arizona Project.

Finally, we want to point out that he and many former members think of IRE as the "Hotel California." As Brant likes to say, quoting the song, "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave."

James V. Grimaldi

IRE President

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