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.