Brittany Hailer

My Background

I joined The Marshall Project - Cleveland after serving as the director of the Pittsburgh Institute of Nonprofit Journalism, a news outlet I co-founded in 2021.

I won the best investigative journalism award in the 2022 Nonprofit News Awards for my reporting on jail deaths. I helped build Pennsylvania’s first-ever jail death database as a reporting fellow for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The case of Hailer v. Allegheny County, a lawsuit that I filed with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, challenged the Pittsburgh jail’s “gag rules,” leading to a settlement where the jail adopted new policies affirming employees’ rights to speak and disclose wrongdoing. My public records request for an incarcerated person’s autopsy made its way to Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, which ruled that the public should have access to autopsy records.

For The Marshall Project, I helped create an Investigate This! toolkit for reporting on deaths in jails and prisons.