22 Facts About James Ridgeway

James Fowler Ridgeway was an American investigative journalist.

James Ridgeway was the Washington correspondent for The Village Voice for over 30 years between the mid-1970s to mid-2000s, and had worked for The New Republic, and Mother Jones.

James Ridgeway had contributed to magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist among others.

James Ridgeway's father was a professor and historian at Wells College, in Aurora, New York.

James Ridgeway's father had served as a British affairs specialist for the State Department during World War II.

James Ridgeway studied in schools in Washington, DC and Garrison, New York, before graduating from Hackley School, a private school in Tarrytown, New York, in 1955.

James Ridgeway went on to graduate with a degree in English in 1959 from Princeton University.

James Ridgeway started his career with The Wall Street Journal, where he covered banking and the economy.

James Ridgeway later went to Europe, where he wrote for The Economist, The Guardian, and The Observer, as a freelancer.

James Ridgeway returned to the United States in 1962, and moved to Washington, DC, where he covered economics and industry for The New Republic for eight years.

James Ridgeway went on to be an editor for the New Left magazine, Ramparts, between 1970 and 1975.

James Ridgeway became nationally known when he revealed in The New Republic that General Motors had hired private detectives to tail consumer advocate Ralph Nader in an attempt to dig up information that might discredit him.

James Ridgeway served as Washington correspondent for The Village Voice where he worked for 30 years, from the mid-1970s until 2006.

James Ridgeway covered politics and foreign affairs including Europe, the Middle East, and the Balkans.

James Ridgeway's topics included the demise of the social safety net, the racist far right's response to the election of Barack Obama, and the case of the Angola 3, three Black men held in solitary confinement for decades in Louisiana.

In 2009, together with longtime editor and collaborator Jean Casella, James Ridgeway founded Solitary Watch, a nonprofit watchdog project that exposes the widespread use of solitary confinement and other abusive conditions in US prisons, jails, and detention facilities.

James Ridgeway received a 2012 Soros Justice Media Fellowship, a 2013 Media for a Just Society Award, and a 2014 Alicia Patterson Fellowship for his reporting on prisons.

In 2016, the New Yorker's Jennifer Gonnerman wrote a piece titled "James Ridgeway's Solitary Reporting", about his work at Solitary Watch and the extensive correspondence he maintained with people held in solitary confinement.

James Ridgeway was extensively interviewed for An Unreasonable Man, a 2007 documentary about Ralph Nader.

James Ridgeway married Patricia Carol Dodge, an editor with The New Republic, in 1966.

James Ridgeway died on February 13,2021, in Washington, DC, at the age of 84.

James Ridgeway co-directed the companion film Blood in the Face, as well as Feed, a documentary on the 1992 presidential campaign.