Kelly Carr is an investigative business journalist. Carr started her career as a sports reporter for the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania while in high school. She later worked as a general assignment reporter for the Battle Creek Enquirer and then as an education and municipal reporter at The Arizona Republic.
As a freelance investigative reporter for Reuters, Carr contributed to award-winning reports on shell companies and accounting fraud in the U.S. Defense Department. She was part of the team that worked on the Luxembourg Leaks project, exposing tax-saving schemes. Carr received a Spotlight Investigative Journalism Fellowship from The Boston Globe in 2016, leading to the series "Secrets in the Sky" on FAA registration issues, which won the 2018 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting.
Carr began her career as a sports reporter for the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania while still a high school student.[4] Throughout college, she worked as a sports correspondent for various news outlets, including the Associated Press.[4] After graduating, she worked as a general assignment reporter for the Battle Creek Enquirer, then moved to The Arizona Republic, where she worked as an education and municipal reporter, and became the Online Platform Coordinator in 2007.[4][8]
While working for the center, Carr also worked as a freelance investigative reporter for Reuters.[9] Together with a team from Reuters, she wrote an award-winning series of reports on shell companies. The first report in the series, "A Little House of Secrets on the Great Plains", earned Carr and Brian Glow the 2011 Foreign Press Association Media Award for Financial/Economic Reporting.[11] The entire series earned the team the 2012 New York Press Club Business Reporting Award for Newswire,[12] the 2012 Gerald Loeb Award for News Services,[13] and the 2012 National Press Club Award for Consumer Journalism, Periodicals.[14]
In 2016, Carr received a Spotlight Investigative Journalism Fellowship from The Boston Globe, which includes $100,000 to work on in-depth investigative projects.[7][18] Working with Jaimi Dowdell, she wrote a series called "Secrets in the Sky" about holes in the Federal Aviation Administration's registration process that won the 2018 TRACE Prize for Investigative Reporting.[19]