Joe Mahoney’s career has spanned a wire service, a newspaper, a television station and teaching at university an. He also spent time as a fry cook, groundskeeper, an EMT and a taxidermist’s assistant.

Along the way he and his colleagues on the photography staff at the Rocky Mountain News in Denver  won two Pulitzer Prizes for Breaking News in the span of three years for coverage of the Columbine shooting in 2000 and the massive wildfires in the state in 2003.

In 2009, he was an associate producer and videographer for "Final Edition" that won a regional Emmy for Topical Documentary on the News' closing. Following the paper's folding, he helped found a non-profit news start-up that eventually merged with the PBS affiliate in Denver.

He is an assistant coach for his daughter’s ice hockey team and that has been more rewarding than almost anything else in these previous paragraphs.

Mahoney has coached at the NPPA's NewsVideo Workshop since 2010 and at the NPPA's Multimedia Immersion since 2010. He is an adjunct faculty at Metro State University in Denver teaching photojournalism and digital storytelling.