Thomas briefed National Press Foundation fellows in May 2022: Justice Through Journalism.

Wendi C. Thomas is the founding editor and publisher of MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom in Memphis focused on poverty, power and public policy. In just five years, MLK50 has gone from a project staffed by scrappy freelancers to a full-fledged, award-winning newsroom committed to dismantling the status quo.

Previously, Thomas was a metro columnist and assistant managing editor at The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal. She’s also been an editor at The Charlotte Observer, a reporter and editor at The (Nashville) Tennessean and a reporter at The Indianapolis Star. Thomas was a 2016 fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

As part of ProPublica’s 2019 Local Reporting Network, she investigated a nonprofit hospital’s aggressive debt collection practices, which led the hospital to erase nearly $12 million in hospital debt for more than 5,300 defendants. The “Profiting from the Poor” series earned her the 2020 Selden Ring Award, first place in the 2019 Association of Health Care Journalists’ contest for business reporting, a first-place tie in the Investigative Reporters & Editors 2019 award and a 2020 Gerald Loeb Award, among other honors.