2020-2021

KERA / The Texas Newsroom

NPR and Texas public radio stations collaborated to form the Texas News Hub. It’s the first step in a systemwide collaborative project to create a nationwide virtual public radio newsroom of 1,000-plus journalists. The collaboration includes two daily, hour-long statewide programs (Texas Standard and Think) and will soon include six daily statewide newscasts, and a statewide digital news desk. The Hub is working to hire and train freelance and small station reporters to provide news service to underserved communities in the state’s news deserts.

KERA / The Texas Newsroom

NPR and Texas public radio stations collaborated to form the Texas News Hub. It’s the first step in a systemwide collaborative project to create a nationwide virtual public radio newsroom of 1,000-plus journalists. The collaboration includes two daily, hour-long statewide programs (Texas Standard and Think) and will soon include six daily statewide newscasts, and a statewide digital news desk. The Hub is working to hire and train freelance and small station reporters to provide news service to underserved communities in the state’s news deserts.

Raymon Troncoso

Raymon Troncoso covers the Illinois statehouse for Capitol News Illinois, with a focus on legislation and issues affecting ethnic communities, minority populations, distressed communities and rural areas. Previously, while attending the University of Florida, he covered local politics and elections, among other things, as a student journalist with WUFT. He was also a Morning Edition host and producer at WUFT TV’s First at Five PBS news show and reported on special projects, earning him Florida AP and regional RTDNA awards. Troncoso was raised in Miramar, FL, where he has been a volunteer wrestling coach at American Senior High School in Hialeah.

Capitol News Illinois

Capitol News Illinois is a news service operated by the Illinois Press Foundation that directly addresses the shrinking press corps at the Statehouse. The mission of Capitol News Illinois is to provide credible and unbiased coverage of Illinois state government, including daily coverage of the Legislature including committee hearings; state agencies and issues; state office holders; and the Illinois Supreme Court and legal matters. Our content is distributed free to nearly 450 daily and non-daily newspapers statewide. Since the news service was launched Jan. 28, 2019, content produced by CNI has been published in 363 Illinois newspapers with a total circulation of more than 1.9 million.

Rita Oceguera

Rita Oceguera covers communities that ring Chicago, including Aurora, Cicero, Elgin, Joliet and Waukegan, for Injustice Watch. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Northwestern University, where she studied social justice and investigative reporting and focused on a range of Latino issues. During her internship at The Bubble in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oceguera dove deep into the inequalities that women face as soccer players and sharpened her skills as a video editor. She then worked with The Chicago Reporter to examine the spread of business vacancies in Chicago and analyzed a prosperous Latino neighborhood. Her partnership with The Chicago Reporter led her into an investigation of the complexities that low income students face when applying to colleges. Originally from Aurora, Oceguera now lives in Chicago with her fiancé, her pet axolotl (a.k.a. a Mexican walking fish) and an abundance of plants.

Injustice Watch

Founded in 2015, Injustice Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. Our work largely focuses on the justice system, individuals who are poorly served by the system, and the policies that perpetuate inequities within the system. Much of our work focuses on how justice is meted out in Cook County; however, we occasionally take on stories outside our primary coverage area that are consistent with our mission. Along with our primary commitment to investigative journalism, Injustice Watch mentors and trains the next generation of reporters through robust internship and fellowship programs. We also partner with communities to create opportunities for discourse and dialogue around our journalism, and experiment with creative, human-centered forms of storytelling.

Natalia Rodríguez Medina

Natalia Rodríguez Medina covers the Puerto Rican community in Rochester, New York, for the Democrat & Chronicle. A native of Puerto Rico, she’s an alumna of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York with a concentration in Spanish language and health and science, and also of the University of Puerto Rico, where she majored in journalism. She’s been a reporter for Diálogo, the paper of the University of Puerto Rico, covering myriad topics including strikes, local politics, health, culture and even Puerto Rico Comic-Con. Throughout her schooling as an undergrad and graduate student, she was also a freelance writer and a translator. She interned at Latino Rebels in New York City, where she was a correspondent covering Latino issues and protests in Puerto Rico.

Democrat & Chronicle

The Democrat and Chronicle is an online and print local news organization primarily serving the Rochester, New York Metro area of nearly 1 million people. We serve as the hub of the USA Today Network's Northeast Crescent Region, which stretches from Vermont to Virginia. We regularly collaborate and share best practices with other local news sites within the Network, as well as with USA Today itself. The Democrat and Chronicle and its predecessor newspapers, first launched in 1833, uphold a proud tradition of community journalism in a city where both the nation's abolitionist and suffragist movements took center stage in the 19th century.

Oklahoma Watch

Oklahoma Watch is a statewide investigative news organization created in late 2010. Our staple is in-depth, data-driven stories and we distribute our content to about 100 news outlets around the state for republication for free. Increasingly we are developing multimedia content with video, stills and interactive tables or data visualizations. We also hold public forums on critical issues and we bring on college interns in journalism and public relations to dig into the severe human-needs problems that afflict our state.

Rose Lundy

Rose Lundy reports for the Maine Monitor, a project of the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, where she will cover health care in the state during the coronavirus pandemic. For three years, Lundy has been a political reporter at The Daily News in Longview, Washington, located in the southwestern portion of the state. There, she reported on two city councils, two state legislative districts and one congressional district. Her story about mobile home park landlords allegedly price gouging and intimidating low-income senior citizens won an award from the Northwest Society of Professional Journalists for social issues reporting. Lundy grew up in Minnesota and earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Throughout high school and college, Lundy spent her summers on trail crews in National Parks in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Colorado, Alaska and Minnesota.