WILL CARRUTHERS

Reporter | Editor | Photographer | Researcher

A portrait of Will Carruthers

Will Carruthers is an award-winning reporter and editor based in California. He is currently a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and a researcher at the Police Records Access Project.

Will’s work has been featured by Project Censored, Politico’s California Playbook and IRE’s Local Matters weekly newsletter.

REPORTING & EDITING

Will has a decade of experience working in a variety of Bay Area newsrooms, including serving as the news editor of his hometown alt-weekly newspaper for four years.

Aug. 2025 - Dec. 2025:

Nov. 2019 - Nov. 2023:
  • Wrote, reported, assigned and edited stories for print and web, covering topics including agricultural pollution, local climate justice campaigns and utility politics.
  • Single-handedly filed and managed dozens of public records requests for several investigative series.
  • Produced multiple award-winning investigative series about a PG&E-funded fire recovery nonprofit and a scofflaw creamery which owed $1.5 million in unpaid bills to local agencies.

Continuing:
  • Will has over a decade of experience in reporting, contributing to local news outlets throughout the Bay Area and beyond.
  • Highlights include profiling a historically significant but unrecognized artist for Hoodline, assisting with the production of a More Perfect Union video about a lawsuit against fossil fuel companies and reporting on an emerging farmworker justice campaign for Modern Farmer.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Visuals play an increasingly important role in digital storytelling. The photographs below offer a sample of Will's visual work.

RESEARCH

Will returned to school in part to modernize his hard skills to thrive in a quickly-changing industry. He has hands-on experience working with artificial intelligence models to analyze massive troves of data and is developing a variety of tech-driven reporting techniques, including web scraping, data analysis and audience engagement.

June 2026 - Aug. 2026:
  • Conduct in-depth research on economic, labor, and political issues to support for vertical videos.
  • Cultivate and maintain a wide range of information sources, from press lists and databases to primary source documents and on-the-ground contacts.
  • Draft research briefs and fact-check scripts for accuracy.

Sept. 2025 - May 2026:
  • Evaluated the efficacy of AI tools used to organize 1.5 million-page database of police misconduct records.
  • Created and populated a dataset of the public access policies at all California Superior Court branches.

Aug. 2024:
  • Researched and wrote an engaging script about the human and environmental history of the Malibu coastline for boat tour guides.

© 2026 Will Carruthers. All rights reserved.