After graduating from the University of Vermont in 2016 with a Bachelors in Political Science, Cory Dawson plunged into a gripping career in investigative journalism. 

His rigorous pursuit of truth through the field of journalism has led him to report for media outlets from VTDigger to The Associated Press to the Student Press Law Center before getting his Master’s Degree in Journalism in 2020. Cory is currently the editor of UVM’s Community News Service, a program that trains budding reporters by pairing them with local newspapers. 

Cory’s passion originally lay in the arts, and he began his college career at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt). 

“I took an extra class at MassArt that was just on the Supreme Court, taught by a retired Harvard Law professor,” he said, “That’s when I realized that I wanted to get into the social sciences and use art as more of a hobby.” 

Upon transferring to UVM in 2013, Cory was interested in documentary filmmaking and joined the Cynic “on a whim” with the hope of specializing in news video. But before long, he was enveloped in reporting.

“It really wasn’t too much of a jump from doing documentary filmmaking to writing print articles,” he said, “Traditional news reporting has a very practical advantage: making a documentary might take months and copious equipment; it takes a long time to tell a story. Whereas, when you’re a news reporter, you can get two or three stories out a day.”

Cory quickly rose in the Cynic ranks, becoming video editor before taking on the position of Editor-in-Chief for three semesters from 2014-2015.

“I really think the Cynic is an excellent outlet for doing practical work that has a very real impact,” he said.

Cory accredits his ‘foot in the door moment’ to his unpaid Bostonian internship for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting in the summer before his senior year. He worked in the WGBH newsroom, the NPR affiliate in Boston, and was suddenly engulfed in the process of producing hard news.

“That was the first time I had been in a big, powerful news organization and worked with ‘real’ reporters. There were people there who had experience with the New York Times and I was involved with helping out their stories, calling people, doing records requests, and I even had my hand in fleshing out some interesting stories,” Cory said. 

His first job after graduation was as a reporter for the Burlington Free Press. He served as both the city reporter and higher education reporter, and these high-voltage positions afforded him some of his most memorable stories. 

One particularly impactful story presented itself while Cory was covering executive pay at Champlain College. By investigating the president’s salary and looking at the school’s expenses and data, he discovered that the President had recently received a huge bonus that put his salary over a million dollars. 

“Never in my reporting do I point out what is immoral or wrong. I’m just putting the facts out there because I think it’s interesting,” Cory said. 

Though his role is simply being the harbinger of hard facts, Cory said his stories would sometimes entice a negative reaction from individuals, forcing him to don thick skin early in his career. He spoke very candidly about the emotional burdens that journalists must shoulder.

“It’s a relatively thankless job. Every now and then you get a nice comment from someone who likes a story you wrote. But if you’re doing real reporting for a long time, 90% of the comments that you get are about how the media is awful or how you’re misrepresenting the story,” he said. “I learned pretty early on that if you just stick to the facts and are fair, any kind of pushback you get is just noise.” 

As he thought about shifting away from daily reporting and into more long-term projects, he decided graduate school would be the best path to build his skill-set and help him stand out in the job market.

From the Free Press, Cory went on to report on politics for The Associated Press and VTDigger before deciding to get a Masters degree in Journalism from Georgetown University in Washington DC. 

“Georgetown had a very practical program where a lot of the professors were people who were currently working in the field. The curriculum allowed me to learn from journalists and see how they were applying their skills,” he said. 

During his time as a graduate student, Cory worked as an investigative intern for NBC News.

He said he is drawn to stories that bring financial scandals, police misconduct, wrinkles in laws, and vestigial rules to the surface. 

While he was reporting for The Associated Press, Cory and his peers wrote a particularly impactful piece on how the Vermont DMV was taking information from noncitizen licenses and sending it to ICE. 

“I wrote a story based on the documents and, when the American Civil Liberties Union caught wind of it, they held a lot of people’s feet to the fire. I think that practice has now ended,” he said. 

Though there are certainly satisfying moments in the career of a journalist, Cory said he wants aspiring reporters to understand the sometimes-grueling dedication that the job requires.

“The work-life balance doesn't really exist at first. You have to really prove yourself,” he said. “You’re constantly on call; if something happened on my beat, I would have to drop everything. There was a time when a City Council meeting went on until 4 a.m., and I had to file the story that morning.” 

Cory is currently serving as editor of UVM’s Community News Service, where he encourages students who are passionate about reporting to develop their skills in partnership with local Vermont newspapers. 

Though he said he is disturbed by the insidious changes that the industry is undergoing, what he calls the “gutting of local news”, he is heartened by the gusto of student journalists.

“The CNS is not a permanent solution to these issues, but we can help out as best we can. I hope that I can be a force-multiplier in the sense that I’m training young reporters to go out and do what I was doing,” Cory Dawson said.