Francis X. Donnelly, who joined The Detroit News in 1999, became an enterprise and projects reporter in October. For three years, he had been a statewide correspondent on the business desk. His stories for the News have ranged from hucksters benefiting from the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy anniversary to a west Michigan boomtown’s exclusion of minorities to an expose of a secretive Detroit power broker.

Donnelly has won several national awards and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times for stories on casino gambling, Central America and a school system’s racist disciplinary policy. He has won dozens of state and local awards for both his investigative reporting and for feature writing, which have described the lives of the famous and the common man.

Donnelly has worked for several other papers, including the Richmond News Dispatch and the Miami Herald.

Donnelly was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. He graduated Rutgers University with a major in Political Science.