DALLAS (AP) — Maud Beelman, a veteran investigative journalist who as a foreign correspondent covered the reunification of Germany and the wars in the former Yugoslavia, has been named to a new position overseeing news coverage and editorial operations for The Associated Press in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
Beelman, 56, joins the AP from The Dallas Morning News, where she is deputy managing editor for investigations and enterprise. She will remain based in Dallas.
In her new role, Beelman will drive aggressive coverage of the top breaking news stories and the development of ambitious and investigative enterprise for all formats in the three states, while working closely with news editors for Texas and Arkansas/Oklahoma as they craft those states’ news reports.
The appointment was announced Tuesday by Brian Carovillano, the AP’s vice president and managing editor for U.S. news.
The appointment is a homecoming for Beelman, who worked for the AP from 1983 to 1997. After beginning her career with AP in her native New Orleans, she reported from Florida and Pennsylvania before working as an editor in New York. She later moved overseas, where her assignments included reporting on the Kurdish refugee crisis in Iran and Iraq after the first Gulf War.
“I am so pleased to welcome Maud back to the AP. She is the perfect editor to help lead AP’s coverage of these fascinating and critical states,” Carovillano said. “Her appointment also shows AP’s continued push for ambitious investigative and accountability reporting from the United States. As she says, Texas and its neighbors are a ‘target-rich environment,’ and I look forward to seeing where she takes our coverage.”
Beelman was later the founding director of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, part of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Public Integrity. Consortium investigations under Beelman’s direction won George Polk, Investigative Reporters and Editors and Society of Professional Journalists awards.
Beelman has been at the Morning News since 2004, where her teams have conducted award-winning investigations into patient safety breakdowns at one of the nation’s largest public hospitals, the deadly 2013 fertilizer explosion in West, Texas, and corruption and abuse in the Texas Youth Commission, among others.
“Texas, along with its neighbors in Arkansas and Oklahoma, are the anchor of middle America,” said David Scott, the AP’s outgoing U.S. Central Region editor. “These are states that provide the nation with presidents and the leading edge of conservative politics. They are home to some of the nation’s largest metropolitan communities, a vast rural expanse that’s at their heart, and they stand watch over hundreds of miles of the country’s southern border.
“In short, these states demand the very best of AP’s journalism, and there’s no better editor than Maud to lead our team there in delivering it.”
Beelman is an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, holds a master’s degree in journalism and communications from the University of Florida and an undergraduate journalism degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
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