Kenny Jacoby
Kenny Jacoby

Investigative reporter

Kenny
jacoby

My name is Kenny Jacoby. I'm an investigative journalist.

I write a lot about sports, but I don’t have one assigned topic.

I consider my beat to be any abuse of power, where someone takes advantage of others. There happens to be lots of those stories in sports – and not enough people covering them.

As an investigative reporter, my goal is to not only shed light on problems, but prove that wrongdoing occurred and people were hurt as a result. That means not just relying on what people tell me, but finding the documents, data and witnesses to back their stories up. It is time-consuming, tedious, often frustrating work that I find highly rewarding. 

My investigations into sexual harassment and assault in schools – college athletic departments, in particular – have sparked sweeping impact and positive change. They prompted the firing for cause of one of the highest-paid coaches in all of sports; forced the head of the nation's largest public university system, a national-championship-winning college football coach, two university presidents and two athletic directors to resign; and landed a longtime sports medicine director in federal prison. Louisiana and California adopted new laws designed to protect students from sexual assault and domestic violence and improve how colleges handle their complaints in response to my reporting. The NCAA also adopted a nationwide policy requiring all 1,200 member colleges to screen athletes for histories of violence. 

I’m pretty nifty with a computer. In college, I studied computer science and taught myself how to scrape websites and PDFs. Ever since, I’ve incorporated my programming skills into every step of my reporting, from finding stories to building source lists, collecting and organizing data and analyzing large sets of documents.

Since 2019, I’ve been a reporter for the USA TODAY investigative team. I also do freelance data scraping – contact me if you have any scraping needs.

I'm always looking for new stories. If you have a tip or idea that needs digging into, please don't hesitate to reach out.

6x winner: Associated press sports editors award for investigative reporting

4x winner/finalist: Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for Sports Investigations, student reporting

3x winner/finalist: Education writers association award for investigative reporting & Public service

3x winner/finalist: national headliner awards for newspaper public service, news series, sports beat reporting

2x finalist: Livingston award for national reporting by journalists younger than 35

society for professional journalists sigma delta chi award for investigative reporting

news leaders association first amendment award

Recent Work