Eric Lipton

Career and Awards

Prior to working for The New York Times, he spent five years each at The Washington Post, The Hartford Courant, and the first two years of his newspaper career at The Valley News in Lebanon, New Hampshire. Lipton is a 1987 graduate of the University of Vermont where he received a BA in philosophy and history.

In 2017, he was part of a team of 11 reporters at The Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for its coverage on Russia’s covert projection of power, including the story of examining Russian hacking of the 2016 presidential election. The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S.

In 2015, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism for a series of stories about lobbying of state attorneys general and Congress. That series of stories also was awarded the 2015 prize for large circulation newspapers by Investigative Reporters and Editors. And he was among a group of reporters that won the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for business reporting. Gerald Loeb Award winners 2015

One of the three stories in the series about state attorneys general focused on Scott Pruitt, then the attorney general of Oklahoma, detailing for the first time the secretive alliance Pruitt had with oil and gas companies and other energy producers, which were sending tens of millions of dollars to the Republican Attorneys General Association that Pruitt helped run at the same time as Pruitt was helping these same companies fight Obama-era environmental regulations, by suing to block these rules in federal court, at least 14 times. Lipton found that Pruitt had taken draft letters written by the energy companies, put them on his state government stationary and sent them in to officials in Washington. When Pruitt was later nominated to serve as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump, this story became a central focus of his confirmation hearing.

In 1992, he won a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism, at the age of 26, for a series of stories he co-authored at The Hartford Courant on the Hubble Space Telescope with Robert S. Capers. The stories examined the team of scientist who built the main mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope, which was considered one of the most complex scientific devices at the time of its launch, and how these brilliant but self-confident scientists, facing financial pressures and other challenges, had made the most fundamental of errors in building a misshapen main mirror for the space telescope, a flaw that was caused terrible embarrassment and questions about the status of United States space science, but was ultimately corrected.

Lipton was also a finalist in 1999 for the Livingston Award for young journalists while working as a reporter at The Washington Post, for a series of stories examining the trash industry in New York City, which then shipped most of its waste via truck to landfills in Virginia. In 2008, he was the recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Vermont.

World Trade Center coverage

Lipton spent months after the September 2001 attacks covering the aftermath of the attacks on New York, writing a series of stories for The New York Times and its "Nation Challenged" section about the efforts to recover and identify human remains from the site and to clear the World Trade Center site of the debris left after the attack. Those stories, co-written with James Glanz of The New York Times, were part of a package that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2002. Pulitzer Prize Explanatory Journalism finalist 2002

A story in The New York Times Magazine he co-wrote with James Glanz, which appeared on the first anniversary of the attacks, examined the history of the trade center towers. That story was the basis for a book he would co-author with James Glanz, published in 2003, City in the Sky, the Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center., which examined the conception, design, construction, life and ultimate destruction of the twin towers, tracing the story back to the 1950s when the project was first proposed by David Rockefeller. A second story, titled Fighting to Live as the Towers Died, examined the fate of the unlucky individuals who were stuck above the point of impact in the two towers after the planes hit, a piece based on hundreds of hours or work collecting random emails, text messages and recollections of phone calls with those victims, all of which were assembled into a single narrative. That story formed the basis of a 2004 book called 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, written by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, who were co-authors on the original New York Times story.

Archival materials from the Lipton and Glanz research effort—the most comprehensive history ever written about the World Trade Center—are now maintained at The New York Public Library. New York Public Library Eric Lipton World Trade Center research files The materials are separated into five chronological categories: Conception (1945-1970), Construction (1966-1973), Life in the Towers (1972-2001), 9/11, and Post 9/11 (2001-2003) The research was also featured in the Ric Burns documentary American Experience New York: The Center of the World (1946-2003)

Homeland Security

Lipton was among the first reporters to be assigned to cover the Department of Homeland Security full-time, starting shortly after it was created, writing stories that examined the challenges associated with the largest change in federal bureaucracy since Harry Truman was president, as the agency struggled as it spent billions of dollars on what turned out to be flawed airport security screening equipment, and even flawed new ships that were supposed to modernize the Coast Guard fleet. His assignment ended up taking him to disaster zones around the world, including weeks spend in Mississippi and Louisiana in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, examining fatal flaws in the government response, and 'Breathtaking' Waste and Fraud in Hurricane Aid. He was also sent in December 2004 to Banda Aceh, along with a team of reporters from The New York Times, to cover the earthquake and tsunami there that killed more than 150,000.

Trump coverage

Lipton has been part of a collection of reporters at The Times who have examined the business operations of the Trump Organization as Donald J. Trump moved to the White House, detailing the potential for conflicts of interest, including Trump hotel in Washington D.C. to Trump operations in the Philippines, Turkey, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Dubai, Vancouver, and other stops, while also looking at how the Trump family took steps to attempt to address some of the issues addressed in these stories. He has also written pieces about the arrival within the Trump administration of former lobbyists, corporate lawyers and corporate executives, like Carl Icahn, who have taken up issues with their new powers that may benefit their holdings or past business partners.

His work has been featured in a number of other documentary films, including The Falling Man, by Harry Singer The Falling Man, and a 2013 film examining government whistleblowers.

Lipton lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Elham Dehbozorgi.