Ian Urbina


Ian Urbina is an investigative reporter who writes most often for The New York Times, but is also a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and National Geographic. Urbina is the author of The New York Times bestseller “The Outlaw Ocean”, based on more than five years of reporting, much of it offshore, exploring lawlessness on the high seas. As a journalist, his investigations typically focus on worker safety and the environment, and he has received a Pulitzer, a Polk, and has been nominated for an Emmy.

Personal life

Urbina currently lives in the Washington DC area with his family.
As a student at St Albans and at Georgetown, Urbina was an accomplished long-distance runner. His father, Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, who was also a highly accomplished collegiate runner, was the first Latino on the federal bench in DC.

Education and career

Ian Urbina has a degree in history from Georgetown University. Before joining The New York Times in 2003, Urbina was in a doctoral program in history and anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he specialized on Cuba. As a Fulbright scholar he did his doctoral dissertation research in Havana.
During those years, he wrote freelance for The International Herald Tribune, Harper's, The Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor. He is a regular contributor to NPR. and CSPAN. In 2016, National Geographic designated Urbina as one of its resident Nat Geo Explorers. Urbina became a Resident Fellow in 2017 at The Safina Center, a research and creative collective focused on environmental conservation, which was founded by the renowned naturalist writer and scholar, Dr. Carl Safina. In 2019, he was brought on staff as an investigator for the United Nations in affiliation with the U.N.'s World Maritime University, based in Malmo, Sweden. Urbina also founded in 2019 a non-profit organization called The Outlaw Ocean Project, dedicated to producing journalism about the environmental, human rights and labor concerns that exist offshore around the world.

The New York Times

Urbina was initially a reporter on the Times' Metro desk. In 2005, Urbina moved to the Times' national desk to become its Mid-Atlantic Bureau chief, where he covered West Virginia coal mining disasters, the Gulf oil spill, the Virginia Tech shootings and numerous other breaking stories. He has also written extensively on criminal justice issues, including stories about the use of prisoners for pharmaceutical experiments, immigrant detainees working as unpaid workers, solitary confinement in immigration detention facilities, and the dependence of the U.S. Defense Department on prison labor. He became a senior investigative reporter for the National Desk in 2010, where he wrote a series in 2011, Drilling Down, about the oil and gas industry and fracking.
On worker safety, in 2013, he wrote a story about longterm exposure to hazardous chemicals and the federal agency, O.S.H.A., which is responsible for protecting against these workplace threats. For the New York Times Magazine, he wrote in 2014 a piece called "The Secret Life of Passwords", about the anecdotes and emotions hidden in everyday web-user's "secure" passwords.
In 2015, Urbina wrote a series called "The Outlaw Ocean", about lawlessness on the high seas. To report the stories, Urbina traveled through Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, much of that time spent on fishing ships, chronicling a diversity of crimes offshore, including the killing of stowaways, sea slavery, intentional dumping, illegal fishing, the stealing of ships, gun-running, stranding of crews, and murder with impunity. This series served as the basis of the book “The Outlaw Ocean” published by Alfred A. Knopf. In 2019, “The Outlaw Ocean” reached The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover nonfiction. The book has since been published in various countries and languages all over the world.

Creative

In 2019, Urbina created a firm called Synesthesia Media, which specializes in mixing mediums. In its first project, the firm functioned as a music label and recruited hundreds of musicians from more than 45 countries. As part of The Outlaw Ocean Music Project, these artists ranged in genre from classical and ambient to electronic and hip hop. Each musician made their own album, inspired by the book and using field recordings that Urbina collected while reporting the book. The project's website says that one of its goals was an experiment in translation, taking journalism and converting it into music. The collection of artistry from The Outlaw Ocean Music Project can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, and on Pandora’s podcast playlist “Pandora Stories: The Outlaw Ocean Music Project.” Featured artists included Gill Chang, Mooncake, Starkey, Headphone Activist, Chromonicci, Sara Landry and Louis Futon.
Over the past decade, several of Urbina's investigative pieces have been adapted to film. In interviews, Matt Damon and John Krasinski have said that the idea for their 2012 film Promised Land came partly from the Times investigative series, "Drilling Down".
A 2007 Times investigation by Urbina about so-called "mag crews"—traveling groups of teenagers, many of them runaways or from broken homes, who sell magazine subscriptions—was optioned for a 2016 movie, American Honey, directed by Andrea Arnold and starring Shia LaBeouf.
In 2010, Urbina wrote a profile for Vanity Fair on Sam Childers, a former Hells Angels's biker and gun runner, turned born-again Christian preacher, who joined the guerrilla fighters in South Sudan. Urbina traveled with Childers, after he was ostensibly hired to kill a brutal warlord named Joseph Kony, leader of a group called the Lord's Resistance Army. In 2011, Childers' life story became the basis of a movie called "Machine Gun Preacher", starring Gerard Butler. Also, in 2011, Urbina's reporting was part of a story optioned for the film Deepwater Horizon with Mark Wahlberg.
In 2015, Leonardo DiCaprio, Netflix and Kevin Misher bought the movie rights for The Outlaw Ocean series in The New York Times to produce a feature film. They also subsequently bought the movie rights for the book published by Alfred A. Knopf.

Awards