Mei-Ling McNamara

Coordinating Editor, Ireland

Mei-Ling McNamara is an award-winning investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker with an extensive background in short and long-form storytelling. She has worked as a reporter, editor, producer and director for international media outlets including the Guardian, The New York Times, Al Jazeera English (People & Power / Earthrise), CNN International, Channel 4 and the BBC World Service. Her print and multimedia pieces have also featured in the Guardian Long Read, The New York Times, the Observer Magazine and Observer on Sunday among others. Her industry work has included investigative and narrative journalism, print/radio features, live news production, foreign/current affairs productions, multimedia investigative projects and long-form documentaries. Working across print and broadcast media, her in-depth investigations often focus on human rights, corporate and tech accountability, environmental crimes and criminal justice issues. Mei-Ling's in-depth investigative journalism work for the Guardian and Al-Jazeera English has led to wider social impacts and numerous awards. The documentary "Children of the Cannabis Trade" for Al Jazeera's People and Power strand made public for the first time the criminalisation of child trafficking victims within the British justice system, while her written feature A Slave in Scotland for Guardian Weekend Magazine received the UK Anti-Slavery Award for exposing the legal and psychological realities migrant labour trafficking victims face in the UK. In 2018 she reported, produced and directed "The Trap", a year-long Guardian documentary and multimedia investigation about the targeting of incarcerated women out of US prisons for the sex industry, which changed how the US Homeland Security now trains their anti-trafficking investigators. To date, The Trap has received the highest views of any Guardian documentary, amassing over 29 million views and selected as among the top 200 pieces of journalism in the paper's last 200 years in print. Most recently she published a two-year investigation, How Facebook and Meta Became Marketplaces for Child Sex Trafficking in the Guardian, which was shortlisted for the British Journalism Awards while impacting US lawsuits on tech safety, including a New Mexico Attorney General lawsuit on child trafficking and tech platforms. Mei-Ling holds a PhD in Trans-Disciplinary Documentary Film at the University of Edinburgh, an MA in Journalism from Goldsmiths, University of London, an MA in American Poetry and Prose from the University of Essex, and a BA in English from the University of California, Davis. She has held numerous positions as a journalism professor in the US and Ireland, most recently working as an MA and BA Journalism Programme Director and Assitant Professor at the University of Galway. She holds memberships and runs mentorships with Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), the Society of Professional Journalists, the Freedom of Information Coalition, and the Foreign Press Association. She is a current 2024 grantee of JournalismFund Europe, working with other journalists on a cross-border investigation between Ireland, France and Germany. She currently lives in the wilds of Connemara, Galway Co., Ireland. Website: https://www.Mei-LingMcNamara.com