2020-2021

Kevin Knodell

Kevin Knodell reports for Honolulu Civil Beat focusing on Hawaii’s large military and veterans’ presence. He was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq as a correspondent for Coffee or Die magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic began. His writing and photography have appeared in The Daily Beast, Playboy and Foreign Policy. He has reported from the field on Northeast Syria’s “Rojava Revolution,” covered U.S.-China military relations, examined America’s vast civil-military divide, interviewed refugees using art to fight terrorist ideology and profiled Iraqi Kurdistan’s nightlife. He’s the producer of the podcast “War College,” the co-creator of the graphic memoir Machete Squad and he wrote the Acts of Valor comic series in Naval History magazine. He’s a former contributing editor at the website War Is Boring, where he supervised field coverage of Iraq and Syria during the Yazidi genocide.

Camille von Kaenel

Camille is an environment reporter who has covered growth and development in San Diego County’s backcountry for inewsource, the aftermath of the Camp fire in Northern California for the Chico Enterprise-Record, and climate policy and politics in Washington D.C. for E&E News. Born in Switzerland and raised in California, she has a bachelor’s in international relations from the University of Geneva and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in New York.

Jacob Douglas

Jacob Douglas covers rural issues including economic sustainability in small-town Missouri for Kansas City, PBS. Douglas covered education technology, renewable energy and rural life during internships with CNBC and Kansas City Public Television. He graduated with honors from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in the Spring of 2020. His most recent projects at the journalism school include leading a team of reporters seeking out much-needed information about COVID-19 in underreported areas in Southern Missouri and developing an arts and culture podcast for the J-School. He grew up in Dallas City, Illinois and got started in journalism by covering high school sports for the Hancock County Journal Pilot.

Ricky Rodas

Ricky Rodas reports for The Oaklandside, where he focuses on immigrant-owned and operated businesses in Oakland, California. The beat covers economic and neighborhood change, barriers to entry, minimum wage struggles and much more. Rodas is a Los Angeles native who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley to Salvadorean parents, studied at California State University-L.A. and was the first investigative reporter for his campus newspaper, The University Times. During his time at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Rodas was awarded Radio Television and Digital News Association’s (RTDNA) Pete Wilson Scholarship and a Jonathan Rodgers Fellowship. He also worked as a research assistant for the Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) at Berkeley where he was part of investigations into L.A.’s s child welfare system and the national sex offender registry. Through years of listening, determination and speech therapy, he overcame a childhood stutter. A multimedia journalist, he concentrated in audio at Berkeley and has experience in radio hosting, producing audio reports, working as a studio engineer, writing breaking news and investigative reporting.

Jake Wittich

Jake Wittich covers Lakeview/Boystown/Lincoln Park areas of Chicago, for Block Club Chicago. He has covered local news with an LGBTQ focus as a weekend reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times and as a freelancer for Block Club Chicago, and various LGBTQ publications including the Windy City Times. His investigative reporting on racism in the Boystown neighborhood was recognized as a finalist in the 2019 Chicago Journalists Association awards. Wittich previously worked as an overnight breaking news reporter for the Sun-Times after completing a summer internship for the newspaper's city desk. He attended Columbia College Chicago, where he was managing editor of its student-run newspaper, The Columbia Chronicle.

Jessi Dodge

Jessi Dodge is a photojournalist with the Buffalo Bulletin, located in Buffalo, Wyo. She spent the last two years working as an assistant director of photography for the Columbia Missourian, the community newspaper managed and staffed by the University of Missouri, as well as its sister publication, VOX Magazine. She has worked as a staff photographer and won three awards from the Missouri Press Association as well as freelancing. She received both her B.J. and M.A. degrees in photojournalism from the University of Missouri. Her final master’s project included two parts: the complete editing and designing of a photo book on Boonville, a smallMissouri river town, and research to better understand the purpose of narrative as a tool for visual storytelling.

Heather Mongilio

Heather Mongilio writes for the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland. She concentrates on military affairs, in particular, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis and nearby Ft. Meade, home to the National Security Agency. Her reporting focuses on the locals who staff these nationally known institutions and how their work affects the region. Mongillo previously covered health, social services and Fort Detrick for The Frederick News-Post in Maryland. She also reported on crime and courts for the Carroll County Times. More of her work can be seen in Environmental Health News and PBS NOVA Next. She earned her master’s degree in science writing from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and her bachelor’s degree in journalism and psychology from American University, where she was editor-in-chief of its student newspaper, The Eagle. Mongilio grew up in Ellicott City, Maryland. Her reporting has been recognized by the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. Press Association, including first and second-place awards for crime, health and investigative reporting. Among those honors was First Place investigative reporting for “What Happened to Amy Metz?” a project that raised questions about a woman found dead outdoors during a blizzard.

Jordan Wilkie

Jordan Wilkie writes and reports for Carolina Public Press in Asheville, North Carolina, where he covers election integrity and conditions of confinement in jails. He has previously written for Carolina Public Press, and his work has also appeared in The Guardian, the Raleigh/Durham IndyWeek and WhoWhatWhy.org. In 2018, Wilkie graduated with a master’s degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In his previous life, Wilkie worked as an administrator and instructor of educational programming in prisons and juvenile detentions in Oregon. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon.

Jose Encarnación

José Encarnación is a journalist for Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, a Puerto Rican publication, where he concentrates on education issues that include massive school closures even before the coronavirus pandemic as well as various scandals involving the island’s education budget. As a journalist and graduate student at the University of Puerto Rico, Encarnación knows the island well. He specialized in Caribbean history and the intersection of sports and society. He has worked as a news and sports reporter for Diálogo UPR, NotiCel and Metro Puerto Rico. In 2019, Encarnación received awards for Best Feature Article and Best Interview granted by the Puerto Rico Association of Journalists. (Its Spanish acronym is ASPPRO.) In 2016, Encarnación completed his B.A. in Journalism at the University of Puerto Rico and is currently working on his master's thesis, which focuses on the political persecution that surrounded the 1966 Central American & Caribbean Games that took place in Puerto Rico.

Douglas Soule

Douglas Soule reports for The Mountain State Spotlight. His in-depth business and economic coverage promotes more extensive coverage of issues affecting the state. Soule has served as the editor-in-chief of the Daily Athenaeum, West Virginia University’s independent student newspaper, for two years. His byline has gone far and wide, including on the front page of The Washington Post and in PolitiFact. He participated in the 2019 Politico Journalism Institute. Born and raised in West Virginia, his hometown is Bridgeport, which is in the northern part of the state.