2020-2021

Sara Cline

Sara Cline reports for The Associated Press, covering the Oregon Legislature and state government, with a special focus on the tech boom and the crisis in housing affordability. Cline covered City Hall and homelessness at the San Antonio Express-News through the Hearst Fellowship Program. During her first year in the program, she covered breaking news and crime for the Times Union in Albany, New York. There, she also had a column. Prior to the fellowship, Cline worked at the Brockton Enterprise and Taunton Daily Gazette, both in Massachusetts, as a general assignment reporter. She has also contributed to newspapers and magazines in Arizona, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. She has won New England Newspaper & Press Association awards in the Sports Column and Racial and Ethnic Issues categories. Cline graduated from the University of Arizona with a B.A. in journalism. During her time at university, she also studied anthropology and participated in an archaeological dig in Italy.

Keren Carrión

Keren Carrión reports for KERA in Dallas as well as The Texas Newsroom, a journalism collaboration among the public radio stations of Texas and NPR. A visual bilingual journalist, originally from Puerto Rico, she’ll bring her intelligence and camera to her work covering communities around Dallas. Carrión graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. with a Bachelor’s in fine arts and spent four years gaining reporting experience in the nation’s Capital. Carrión recently worked with CNN as a video editor in Atlanta, Georgia, where she edited and produced videos for on-air and the network’s digital platforms. She has previously interned with CNN, the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, USA Today, Univision, and The Hill. Carrión is an alumnus of the 2019 New York Portfolio Review, the Eddie Adams Workshop XXXI, and the 2019 Momenta Photo Workshop Project Puerto Rico.

Brittany Callan

Brittany Callan reports for The Beacon, a nonprofit, digital news organization in Kansas City, Missouri, where she focuses on health and the environment and the connections between the two. Before joining Report for America, Callan was a communications associate at the Medical College of Wisconsin and a freelance fact-checker for Discover Magazine. She has reported on a labor union movement in the service industry for Milwaukee Magazine and research in bioprosthetic ovaries for Northwestern Research News. She graduated with an M.S. in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 2018, where she specialized in health, environment and science. She holds a B.S. in biomedical engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering in 2015.

PrincessSafiya Byers

PrincessSafiya Byers is a reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service which focuses on low-income minority residents of the Wisconsin city. Her wide-ranging beat covers health, minority businesses, faith, jobs, housing and transportation. A proud Milwaukee native, Byers is a 2020 graduate of Marquette University, the Catholic university in Milwaukee. She has had internships with the Milwaukee Community Journal, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service itself. Byers has also co-produced a community podcast and written for community newsletters. In 2018, she was awarded the Bucks Youth Leader award for community service and leadership. In addition to her journalism, Byers has been working for the non-profit children and family center, COA Youth and Families Center, which began in 1906 as the Children’s Outing Association.

Michael Butler

Michael Butler reports for Technical.ly, where he covers winners and losers in the tech economy in Philadelphia. He moved to Philadelphia in 2010 to participate in the AmeriCorps program CityYear and later covered the arts during an internship with the Philadelphia Weekly and attended Temple University, where he graduated in 2016. He grew up in Augusta, Georgia, as part of a military family and moved around several times over the course of his life. As a freelance journalist, he has contributed to platforms like National Public Radio affiliate WHYY and reported on culture and the arts for publications like Okayplayer and Remezcla. In 2018, he was nominated for the Freelance Reporter of the Year award by Philadelphia’s Pen & Pencil Club. In 2019, he was one of the recipients of the Lenfest Institute for Journalism’s inaugural Next Generation Award grant. Later that year, he was selected by the Maynard Institute for Journalism to be a Maynard 200 fellow.

Madeline Burakoff

Madeline Burakoff covers health care for Spectrum Milwaukee, part of Spectrum Networks, which brings hyperlocal content to audiences through multimedia and long-form journalism. Burakoff has previously worked as an intern for CNN’s Southeast Bureau, focusing on immigration and politics. As an intern at Smithsonian magazine, she wrote a wide variety of stories on science, environment, history and culture, including features on the collapse of global biodiversity and the physical impact of space travel on astronauts. Burakoff received her B.S. and M.S. degrees from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism with a specialization in science reporting and a minor in Spanish, including a semester at Universidad del Salvador/Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At The Daily Northwestern, the campus newspaper, she was a managing editor and helped lead award-winning coverage of the school and its administration. She co-authored an account of a campus gun scare that won first place for a News Story from the Illinois College Press Association (ICPA). Burakoff is a Southern California native.  

Katie Brown

Katie Brown reports for Pine Tree Watch, a publication from The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting. Maine has lacked a full-time journalist focused on climate and energy and Brown is filling that role. She worked as a local newspaper reporter and community radio producer covering environmental issues while earning her master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She moved to Washington, D.C. to complete the final step of her master’s degree, where she worked at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and contributed to a climate change communication campaign for the National Park Service. Before pursuing a career in public service journalism, Brown was an undergraduate researcher at California State University, Monterey Bay and earned a B.A. in environmental studies. She has worked as a field biologist alongside Alaskan fishermen studying fish guts and collaborated with researchers in Ethiopia to conserve indigenous church forests. Her work has been featured in the Mercury News, High Country News, Science News, and Mongabay. She has a Master Scuba Diver rating.

Kailey Broussard

Kailey Broussard is an accountability reporter covering Arlington, Texas for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. With a population of almost 400,000 people, Arlington is among the nation’s largest cities with no daily professional news presence. While pursuing her journalism degree at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, she reported on Arizona’s congressional delegation in Washington D.C., pedestrian fatalities in the Sun Belt, and Venezuelan refugees in Peru as well as U.S. disaster response through a 2019 Carnegie-Knight News21 reporting fellowship. She holds an MMC from Arizona State University and a B.A. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Originally from Louisiana, Broussard spent two years interning and freelancing for The Advocate in Baton Rouge and four years as a staff writer and editor for her student paper, The Vermilion. Her work has won recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists regions 11 and 12, Southeast Journalism Conference, Arizona Press Club, and Broadcast Education Association.

Paul Braun

Paul Braun reports for WRKF and WWNO, the NPR member stations in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where he covers the Louisiana Legislature. His coverage of Louisiana politics and policy as the interim capital access reporter for the stations has aired on national programs, including All Things Considered, Morning Edition and Here & Now. Braun continues reporting in the same capacity as a Report for America corps member. He is a graduate of Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication, where he covered the Louisiana Legislature and the criminal justice system as a member of the Manship School News Service. Braun joined WRKF as an intern in February 2019 and took over as the station’s full-time political reporter six weeks before Louisiana’s gubernatorial primary. He previously worked as an intern at The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware, and as a contributing writer and radio reporter for The Daily Reveille, LSU’s student-run newspaper.

Laura Brache

Laura Brache reports for WFAE/La Noticia, a joint project of the Charlotte, North Carolina, NPR affiliate and the largest Spanish language newspaper in North Carolina. She focuses on immigration and deportation issues affecting the area’s booming Hispanic population and engulfing local governments and police. Brache is part of the team at WFMY News in Greensboro, North Carolina that won the Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for social media for its coverage of storm damage from a series of tornados. She is a multilingual multimedia journalist from North Carolina who was born in Massachusetts and raised in the Dominican Republic. Most recently she worked as a Production Coordinator at her alma mater, the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media assisting in the production of special student projects. Her journey in broadcasting began at WFMY News 2 in Greensboro, where she covered breaking news, severe weather and everything in between. Brache is a member of the July 2019 cohort of the Syracuse University online Master of Science program specializing in journalism innovation. She expects to complete the program by the end of 2020.