Cheree Franco is an award-winning print and photojournalist. She has profiled both a US Senator and the founder of OkCupid, covered South by Southwest and Sundance festivals, reported for three months from the Dakota Access Pipeline protest camps, and followed the grassroots caretakers at New Orlean’s Lincoln Beach, a segregation-era Black beach that has been officially closed since 1964 but never abandoned by users. In Arkansas, she investigated a 20-year-old murder conviction, highlighting procedural errors and details that juries never heard. Her coverage ultimately helped the Innocence Project secure a woman’s release from a life sentence without parole. She has reported from New York, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Pakistan, with work appearing in newspapers on two continents, as well as in VICE, Huck, Places Journal and elsewhere. Most recently, she taught journalism at Tulane University.
Beat: Agriculture reporter
The agriculture and water reporter will work with Verite News staff, as well as collaborating with local, regional and national partners, to tell stories about the region’s rural and urban farms, commercial fishermen and companies that catch seafood along the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. This reporter will also document the role of shifting environmental and other regulations, especially at the state and federal level, on local farming and fishing communities in southeast Louisiana.