Prior to joining Salem Reporter to cover education and children’s social services, Friel covered Idaho’s Wood River Valley as an intern for the Idaho Mountain Express, a twice-weekly, locally-owned print newspaper that serves as the paper of record in Blaine County, Idaho. Across two internships for the Express, he covered everything from elections and the environment to housing and transportation. His reporting was recently recognized in the Idaho Press Club’s Best of 2025 Annual Awards. He holds a degree in history from Dartmouth College, where he was executive editor of the college’s independent student newspaper, The Dartmouth. He also handled layout for The Dartmouth’s print edition, spearheaded a project to introduce a twice-monthly print magazine and wrote a regular cooking column! His writing has also been featured in the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine and The New York Times Book Review. He speaks Spanish and French, and when not chasing down a story, you can find him immersed in a book!
Beat: Education/children's social services in Salem
Salem Reporter is establishing this new beat to work in coordination with our education enterprise beat to focus on forces that impact the local school system’s ability to teach students. One primary focus is to delve into performance and cost social service and nonprofit agencies dealing that try to deal with child abuse and neglect, family poverty and youth development. With this beat, Salem Reporter would give the community independent information on groups that often raise substantial sums in grant and donation funding with little outside evaluation of their results. Another role of this reporter is to delve into government agencies whose decisions and actions directly affect how local schools can teach. The Oregon Department of Education is heavily bureaucratic, costly and with years of producing poor student results. A local education service district intended to support local schools is a ghost, little understood and rarely examined. The reporter is expected to use a blend of breaking news, profiles, enterprise and investigative work to provide revealing coverage. The coverage is also expected to front possible solutions to impediments or operational flaws this reporting uncovers.