Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter Austin Grabish traded in winter boots for a surfboard and has over a decade of reporting experience. He joined the ABC 10News team in 2023.
In 2026, Austin was named Media Person of The Year by the Consumer Attorneys of San Diego, which, recognized how his reporting has exposed fraud and held powerful officials accountable who’ve wasted taxpayer dollars and bent rules behind closed doors.
Austin is a three-time Emmy Award winner and nine-time nominee.
In 2026, he won an Emmy for his work detailing the story of a survivor of a prison dubbed the ‘Rape Club’ by staff who abused inmates.
In 2025, he won an Emmy for reporting on a sophisticated phone hacking scam that drained a victim’s bank account. Austin tracked down the criminal responsible and helped get the victim’s money back.
A year earlier, Austin won an Emmy for his investigation into a burial-at-sea business that went dark after taking human ashes from customers across the country. The story triggered multiple state investigations.
The Society of Professional Journalists has honored Austin with nine awards that recognize his work exposing deadly flaws in the military’s Osprey aircraft, deaths at the City of San Diego’s safe sleeping sites and a taxpayer-funded secret investigation into a police chief. In 2026, he was a finalist for the SPJ’s Journalist of the Year award.
During his first year in San Diego, Austin’s reporting led to a criminal conviction, helped consumers recover thousands of dollars and exposed a doctor who admitted to putting a hidden camera in a hospital restroom before moving out of state to work.
His reporting on the migrant border crisis in 2023 during the lead-up to the end of Title 42 earned an Emmy nomination and shined a light on the human faces often lost in the fierce debate around U.S. immigration.
Austin covers the Medical Board of California, military investigations, and is a watchdog on local government.
He has extensive experience using freedom of information laws to uncover documents for investigative stories that haven’t been told. Before moving to San Diego, Austin worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
In Canada, Austin’s stories aired on the country’s flagship national nightly newscast: The National, and on CBC News Network. He also reported for national radio and his work aired on over a dozen local CBC TV stations.
His dogged reporting on the Canadian Museum for Human Rights won the investigative excellence award from RTDNA Canada in 2021 and triggered the resignation of the organization’s CEO. Austin revealed the national museum forced staff to hide LGBT material and women’s rights content when religious school groups were present.
In 2020, Austin was instrumental in showing how Indigenous communities were disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. He reported from a remote fly-in community as the military was deployed to help fight the battle. Austin also covered the impact of mandatory lockdowns on businesses and the government’s failure to properly contact trace during the pandemic.
In 2019, Austin led CBC’s network coverage during the massive manhunt for teenage killers Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod in northern Canada. The manhunt is one of the largest in Canadian history.
A year earlier, he received the national RTDNA Canada Ron Laidlaw Award for his reporting on asylum seekers who lost limbs to frostbite after risking their lives to enter Canada on foot in the middle of the winter. His in-depth reporting later revealed how hundreds of other asylum seekers had risked their lives to come into the country from the United States and documented one woman’s fatal attempt to get asylum.
Austin’s stories have been followed by international news outlets including the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post, the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Before starting his broadcasting career, Austin reported for several Canadian newspapers.
Austin is thrilled to call America’s Finest City home and welcomes any story ideas, tips and feedback from viewers.
Austin can be reached by email at austin.grabish@10news.com
