Alina Panek is the Corps Excellence Project Coordinator for Report for America. Based in Chicago, she recently graduated from Denison University, where she studied Communication and Narrative Journalism. Alina won a President's medal for her leadership, academic success and contribution to cross-cultural engagement, which includes Editor of the college newspaper and founding a first-generation student professional and social network. She worked with CBS Chicago for several summers as an Emma Bowen Fellow and recently finished a metro desk internship with the Columbus Dispatch. Deeply interested in both journalism and nonprofit work, she is excited to learn more and develop her skills at Report for America.
Teri Hayt is Report for America's Director of Corps and Newsroom Excellence and Regional Manager, Region 5 (All corps members who are part of the Mississippi River Basin Project, also called the Ag & Water Desk). Hayt most recently was the interim executive director of the News Leaders Association. During 35 years in the publishing industry, she has held staff management positions at Time-Life Books, Inc., Sports Illustrated, The San Diego Union, Newsday and The Orlando Sentinel.
Hayt helped merge the American Society of News Editors with the Associated Press Media Editors to form the News Leaders Association in 2019. Previously, Hayt was the executive editor for GateHouse Media Ohio and the managing editor at the Arizona Daily Star.
She received the Society of Professional Journalists 2012 Sunshine award and directed coverage of “Barriers to Mental Health” which received APME’s 2011 Public Service award. The series documented the obstacles for seeking help for the seriously mentally ill. The project followed the deadly shooting in Tucson, AZ, that killed six and wounded thirteen, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Hayt is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, is a past president of the Arizona Newspaper Association, was the First Amendment chair and vice-president for the national Associated Press Media Editors organization and was a member of the APME board from 2010 to 2015. She served as a Pulitzer jurist in 2014.
Pam Fine is Report for America's Corps Excellence Regional Manager, Region 4 (Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin). Fine is a veteran journalist and educator who has worked at major news organizations in Atlanta, Minneapolis and Indianapolis. Most recently, she held the Knight Chair for News, Leadership, and Community as a tenured professor at the University of Kansas, where she collaborated on projects with professional news organizations and taught reporting, ethics and other courses.
Prior to joining the University of Kansas, Fine was managing editor of the Indianapolis Star where she expanded digital coverage and strengthened investigative reporting. Before that she was managing editor and vice president of the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. There, she led a major restructuring of news operations and a variety of high-impact journalism projects, including a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. She is currently on the board of the News Leaders Association Foundation (formerly ASNE Foundation.) She is also on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee of the national Evans Scholars Foundation.
Fine has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in media management from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Jason Blakeney is Report for America's Director of Corps and Newsroom Excellence. Previously, Blakeney was Report for America's Regional Manager for the Southwest (serving Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas) for five years. He has 20 years of experience, holding various editor titles throughout the United States, including the lead position on the Center for News and Design national desk, and planning editor at the Louisville Courier-Journal. Blakeney was previously the executive editor of GateHouse Media Northwest Florida, where he oversaw the combination of the Northwest Florida Daily News, Panama City News Herald and 10 associated non-daily products into a single newsroom workflow. A 2002 graduate of the University of Alabama, Blakeney began his career at the Phenix Citizen in Phenix City, Alabama, before joining the sports department of the Pensacola News Journal.
Sergio Bustos is Report for America's Corps Excellence Regional Manager, Region 3 (Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Puerto Rico). Bustos has been a journalist for more than three decades. He most recently was the deputy opinion editor at the Sun Sentinel. Over the span of his career, he reported, wrote and edited for newspapers, large and small, including the Staunton, Va., Daily News Leader, The Wilmington, Del. News Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald and USA Today.
He was a Washington correspondent for the former Gannett News Service and covered the 2016 presidential campaign for The Associated Press. He’s also worked as an editor for POLITICO.
Bustos has won several state and national journalism prizes, including the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award and was part of a team of Philadelphia Inquirer reporters named as finalists for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize. In 1984, he graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, where he studied mass communications. In 1992, he was awarded a yearlong fellowship to study international journalism at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and at El Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City.
José María Herrera is training coordinator, responsible for training logistics within Report for America, as well as managing the online community of corps members and host newsrooms. They are a multimedia journalist and editor with a passion for audience engagement. Jo has worked in a range of storytelling roles, most recently as Census Information Officer for the State of Minnesota. Before that, they worked on audience engagement projects at Public Radio International/PRX and as the digital editor for eight local newspapers in the Twin Cities metro. Jo is an alum of the 2017 Poynter-NABJ Leadership Academy for Diversity in Digital Media and of the Sigma Sigma Sigma National Sorority. They graduated from the University of Missouri with a degree in convergence journalism and certificates in multicultural studies and women's and gender studies. Jo is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota where live with their two cats and rabbit.
Norman Parish is director of recruitment at Report for America. Over a three decade career in journalism, Norman has worked in seven states. Most recently, he was the metro editor at the Daily Southtown, a Tribune Publishing Co. newspaper covering parts of Chicago's South Side and suburbs. Before that he was an assistant metro editor at the Chicago Sun-Times. He also was a reporter at the Sun-Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Arizona Republic, (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, Milwaukee Journal and several other newspapers.
Todd Franko is the RFA director of local sustainability and development. He served as editor of The Vindicator from 2007 until it closed in August 2019. He previously was an editor at the Rockford Register Star in Illinois, the Sandusky Register, the Post-Tribune, the Columbus Telegram and the Corning Leader. His Ohio newsrooms won first place General Excellence awards in competitions in 2014, 2013, 2002, 2001 and 1999. Franko has also been an active civic leader and prolific fundraiser for local causes, as board member of The Boys and Girls Clubs of Youngstown; founder of The Simeon Booker Group, dedicated to honoring famed Civil Rights journalist Simeon Booker; a co-founder of The NewsOutlet, an Ohio journalism collaborative of 5 universities and 5 professional media organizations. He's a son of Buffalo, NY and lives in Youngstown, Ohio. His wife is a teacher and his 3 sons are all in college.
Alison Bethel is Vice President of Corps Excellence at Report for America, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project that places emerging journalists in newsrooms across America. Previously, she was Executive Director of the Society of Professional Journalists, where she was only the second woman and the first person of color to serve in that capacity in SPJ’s 110 years. Bethel has more than 35 years of experience as an award-winning reporter, bureau chief, senior editor and media trainer. She has worked in senior-level positions at The Boston Globe, The Detroit News, Legal Times and the Nassau Guardian in The Bahamas. From July 2016 to May 2017, Bethel served as a visiting professor of print and investigative journalism for the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media in Bangalore. She also spent a year in Accra, Ghana, for the Washington, D.C.-based International Center for Journalists, as a Knight International Journalism Fellow, helping Ghanaian journalists improve their reporting skills in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election. She also worked at The Miami Herald, The Los Angeles Times, Poughkeepsie Journal and the now-defunct State Times in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 2009, she joined the International Press Institute, based in Vienna, Austria, as Deputy Director before becoming the Institute’s executive director a year later. She was the first woman and the first person of color in IPI’s 60-plus-year history to hold the position. The next year, she was named one of the 60 most influential Black women in Europe by the nonprofit Black Women in Europe. In 2018, she was awarded the President’s Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Bethel is a co-founder of the Media Institute of the Caribbean and is a board member for Journalism & Women’s Symposium, a member of Journal-ism’s Strategic Committee, a board member of Southern Foodways Alliance and an advisory board member for the International Center for Media Ethics. She holds membership with the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists