2020-2021

Alanna Elder

Alanna Elder reports for WITF, NPR radio and PBS television stations, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where she focuses on Latinos in central Pennsylvania and the 2020 elections, how the growing community will make its influence felt, what barriers to voting exist and how it might affect this battleground state. Elder served as deputy editor, podcast producer, and contributor for the Latin America News Dispatch while pursuing a master’s degree in journalism and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. In 2018, she worked as a morning edition host and reporter at KFSK Community Radio in Petersburg, Alaska, and won an Alaska Press Club award for her feature reporting. Elder got her start in journalism at Wyoming Public Radio, where she reported on a variety of topics including mental health, economic development and the environment. She also collaborated on WPR’s award-winning podcast, HumaNature. She holds a B.S. in Agroecology and Environment and Natural Resources from the University of Wyoming, which is based in her hometown of Laramie.  

Kaye LaFond

Kaye LaFond is a reporter who employs her extensive data skills for the Traverse City Record-Eagle in Michigan. Her focus as a Report for America corps member is bringing thoroughly reported, meaningful analysis of the numbers behind assumptions and trends to the Record-Eagle’s readers. LaFond is an engineer-turned-reporter who covered science, the environment and tribal affairs during stints at Michigan Radio and Interlochen Public Radio. Her investigative journalism has highlighted failures of government and has been recognized with two regional Edward R. Murrow awards for Best Investigative Reporting and one for Best News Documentary as well as numerous awards from the Michigan Association of Broadcasters and the Michigan Associated Press Media Editors. Before becoming a full-time journalist, LaFond produced infographics and animations for the science communications team at the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab. She holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from Michigan Technological University, as well as bachelor’s degrees in both Environmental Engineering and Applied Ecology. LaFond lives in northern Michigan.

Kyeland Jackson

Kyeland Jackson covers a number of issues for Twin Cities Public Television in St. Paul, Minnesota, including the causes and effects of racial disparities. He holds bachelor’s and graduate degrees in communications from the University of Louisville and has won awards from the Kentucky Associated Press Broadcasters as well as the Louisville Society of Professional Journalists. Jackson was also selected for the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporter’s Data Institute. Raised in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Jackson was also the editor-in-chief of The Louisville Cardinal, a weekly independent newspaper at his alma mater.

Shivani Patel

Shivani Patel reports for The Ventura Star in Camarillo, California, where she focuses on education, the disparity between expenditures and outcomes and how a 2014 state school funding law is affecting children. Patel knows the Pacific Coast. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, and she has been a staff writer, assistant editor and web editor for The Malibu Times, a hyperlocal publication based in Malibu, California. She reported on everything from breaking news to public meetings and developed a beat covering public school education. Shivani won several awards for coverage of two major 2018 events: the Malibu Creek State Park shooting and the Woolsey Fire. In 2017, she graduated with a B.S. in journalism and concentration in Spanish from Boston University. Patel has won the Foot in the Door Fellowship from the L.A. Press Club and several awards from the California News Publishers Association, among other honors.

Anna Van Dine

Anna Van Dine reports for Vermont Public Radio, where she is covering the deeper issues revealed by the coronavirus pandemic, and helping produce and co-host VPR’s daily podcast, “The Frequency.” Van Dine first joined VPR as an intern in the summer of 2019. She was also the News Director at WNYU, New York University’s student-run radio station, where she oversaw student podcast production and the weekly news show. Van Dine has training in oral history and was an interviewer for the New York Public Library (NYPL) Rikers Public Memory Project. Prior to that, she spent time at StoryCorps and the Vermont Folklife Center. Van Dine grew up in the Mad River Valley in Central Vermont. She is a graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study.

Brandon Pho

Brandon Pho reports for Voice of OC, a publication in Santa Ana, California, where he covers North Central Orange County, a diverse area with thriving Korean, Vietnamese and Hispanic communities. For the past two years as an intern at Voice of OC and in writing for other publications, he has held local governments accountable. In 2019, his investigation revealed local county fair officials spending hundreds of thousands of public dollars on special dinners for themselves and uncovered a conflict-of-interest scandal involving the fair’s CEO, who was eventually fired. As the son of a Vietnamese American immigrant, Pho was senior editor for his college newspaper, The Daily Titan at Cal State Fullerton, where his work garnered first place honors at the Los Angeles Press Club and the College Media Association. His reporting has landed him on public radio, and his work has been cited in federal court. IN 2018, He won first place for Best Breaking News and second place for Best Feature Story from the College Media Association. Pho was also a Mark of Excellence finalist in 2018 for breaking news reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Conor Morris

Conor Morris reports for the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative focusing on poverty in the city including housing, health and education. Morris covered Appalachian southeast Ohio for the weekly newspaper The Athens News for six years. He reported on Athens County, but especially local government, the campus of Ohio University (his alma mater), cops and courts, and the social and economic issues facing the residents of Ohio’s poorest county. Morris helped guide The News toward two Newspaper of the Year awards in its division of the annual Ohio News Media Association Hooper Contest. Morris himself won six first-place Hooper awards for his reporting over the years, including for a story series about police and hospital failures in a sexual- assault investigation in Athens. Morris was born in Marietta, Ohio.

Joan Meiners

Joan Meiners reports for The Spectrum in St. George, Utah, and focuses on the consequences of growth in Cedar City. Meiners has a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Florida, where she published multiple peer-reviewed scientific articles. As a journalist, she has written about the environment for Smithsonian Magazine, Discover Magazine, Orion Magazine and New Scientist Magazine. She spent 2019 as a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network investigating pollution from the oil and gas industry in southeast Louisiana for the ‘Polluter’s Paradise’ series, which won the Bayou Brief award for Louisiana’s Best Environment Reporting of 2019. The previous year, she got her start doing newspaper writing as an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) fellow at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Before that, she produced data journalism for the award-winning series, ‘Peak Florida’ while still a graduate student.

K. Sophie Will

K. Sophie Will reports for The Spectrum in St. George, Utah, where she focuses on the major national parks in the area—Bryce Canyon, Zion, and the Grand Canyon—and the consequences of growth and tourism. Being in Utah marks a return for Will, who grew up in Draper, Utah. She is an investigative data journalist who has covered everything from local government to major human rights violations at investigative multimedia internships with NBC 10 Boston, HuffPost, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting/WGBH and The Deseret News. She has also covered daily metro news at the Boston Globe as well as climate change and women’s rights at the Thomson Reuters Foundation in London. At Boston University, where she graduated with her bachelor’s in journalism in May 2020, she was the managing editor and the pioneering in-depth and data editor at the BU News Service.

Orion Donovan-Smith

Orion Donovan-Smith covers Congress and Washington, D.C., for The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington. He worked as the Investigative Reporting Workshop fellow on the documentary “Plastic Wars,” a Frontline investigation into recycling and the plastics industry. Prior to that, he was an intern and later a part-time producer at the NPR program “1A” in 2019, while finishing a master’s degree in journalism from American University. Earlier in the program, he worked with the investigative team and as a general assignment reporter at The Washington Post, covering immigration. Before turning to journalism, he worked on international development programs in Central Africa. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington.