About Mike Wendland

A Reporter Tells the Story

Mike Wendland is an 18-time Emmy Award-winning journalist with more than 40 years in broadcast and print news. He was an investigative reporter for The Detroit News and WDIV-TV in Detroit, a Detroit Free Press columnist, and technology correspondent for NBC News Channel. His work has appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Reporters are trained to ask what it was like to be there. The siege of Jerusalem in AD 70 was one of the great catastrophes of the ancient world, yet we see it mostly through one interested witness, Josephus. The Last Reporter asks a reporter's question: what if someone inside the walls had kept filing?

He and his wife, Jennifer, run RV Lifestyle Media, a travel media company. The Tenth of Av is his first novel and book one of five, publishing November 3, 2026; the rest follow roughly every ninety days. He writes The Last Reporter on Substack and lives in southwest Michigan.

From the Field

Mike Wendland on assignment in Jerusalem, reporting before a camera with the Old City behind him — On assignment in Jerusalem.

A shelf of Emmy Awards from Mike Wendland's television career — Some of the Emmys.

A bulletin board covered in decades of press passes, media credentials, and convention badges — The press-pass wall — warzones, political conventions, presidents, popes and the space program.

Broadcast still: Mike Wendland, investigative reporter, reporting on camera for Detroit's Local 4 — Investigative reporter, Detroit's Local 4.

A lineup of Emmy Awards around a glowing ON AIR sign, plaques naming the WDIV investigations that won them — More of the Emmys, with the ON AIR sign still lit.

Mike Wendland in a wide-brimmed sun hat, giving a thumbs-up in front of a parked U.S. Air Force jet — An Air Force jet.

The Second Source — a free Ray Mercer short story

Free Short Story

Meet Ray Mercer.

Detroit, winter 2003. Three men are dead in a rooming house fire, and the only witness is an old Army veteran nobody believes. Ray Mercer, a young TV reporter who will not run a story on one source, sets out to find a second. A complete, standalone story from The Last Reporter series, free.

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