Sara Ganim

Sara Ganim is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and documentary film director who started her career as a newspaper reporter, went on to report for CNN, and started her own production company. She won a Pulitzer Prize at age 24 for breaking and covering the investigation into former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of boys.

Ganim spent seven years as a national reporter for CNN, covering various issues, including government agencies, the rise of the anti-fascist movement in the U.S., the NCAA’s mishandling of concussions, and American drinking water issues.

In 2015, she won a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for her investigative report exposing the low reading levels of some college athletes. Ganim's documentary No Defense premiered in 2020. She has consulted on documentary and feature films, including the 2018 HBO film Paterno. She was the main reporter for the Emmy-nominated CNN documentary Deadly Haze.

In 2018, Ganim’s first documentary, a 30-minute investigative piece on drinking water in rural America titled Dirty Water, aired on CNN. In June 2019, she was named the University of Florida’s first Hearst Journalism Fellow at its Brechner Center for Freedom of Information. There, she worked with students on data journalism projects. In 2019, she started a production company, called Cedar Production, with her husband, NBC legal analyst Danny Cevallos.