Bill Birnbauer, Australia, was an investigative reporter and senior editor at The Age and The Sunday Age newspapers for more than three decades. He has written three books and numerous book chapters, and has produced documentaries for ABC and SBS television in Australia.

His most recent book, "The Rise of Nonprofit Investigative Journalism in the United States", was published in 2019.

Birnbauer is the founder and CEO of Democracy’s Watchdogs, a nonprofit site that hosts video interviews with Australia’s most iconic current and former investigative journalists.

He was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 1993. He has also won several key journalism awards. He participated in two ICIJ projects: the first exposing links between organized crime syndicates and Big Tobacco, and The Water Barons, an award-winning project on the privatization of water.

Birnbauer has a PhD based on his research on nonprofit investigative journalism in the United States. He was a senior lecturer and adjunct professor in journalism at Monash University in Melbourne. He is a former vice chair of the ICIJ’s Network Committee.

In 2024, Birnbauer was made an alumni of the ICIJ network, acknowledging his significant contributions to journalism and to ICIJ.

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BAT finds a partner in Asia’s most notorious criminal organization

The Chinese consume almost one out of every three cigarettes manufactured worldwide, or 1.6 trillion out of about 5.2 trillion cigarettes consumed annually. And their consumption grows about 2 percent each year. It's no wonder, then, that in the early 1990s British American Tobacco considered China "key to BATCo's longterm success," according to an internal company document.

Mar 03, 2001
Investigation: Big Tobacco Smuggling