Zach Fannin

Zach Fannin is a freelance producer, editor, and cameraperson who has worked for the PBS NewsHour, Vice News, MSNBC, News Corp, Bloomberg TV, and The Daily Beast.

In early 2018 Fannin won a Peabody Award for the five-part PBS NewsHour series Inside Putin's Russia. Prior to his work as a freelancer, he was a producer and editor at ABC News for close to a decade, working primarily for the flagship evening news show, World News Tonight. 

Since 2012, he has chosen an entrepreneurial path toward journalism, covering international stories, often in hostile environments, that are not usually covered by U.S.-based news organizations.

Fannin creates work from beginning to end, pitching, developing, producing, shooting, editing, and writing text articles, using his own gear.

Fannin was the first American journalist to raise questions about a series of extrajudicial killings of Muslim clerics in Kenya. In 2015 he was the exclusive recipient of a draft of a human rights violation report from the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights. The document—which was released after Fannin's reporting—detailed 25 extrajudicial killings and 81 "enforced disappearances" of ethnic Somalis across Kenya. Fannin followed up this text report with an investigative four-part series for PBS NewsHour.

He has embedded with Nigeria's army, Kenya's militarized police, and spent a month in the war-torn regions of Chechnya and Dagestan.

Fannin has created video segments in Nigeria, Russia, Kenya, Germany, Mauritius, Mali, Morocco, and many other countries.

As a staff producer and editor at ABC News, Fannin was the recipient of  both an Edward R. Murrow Award and an Alfred I. du Pont Award.