2020-2021

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.

John Boyle

John Boyle reports for WFPL News Louisville where he covers the local civics beat—from Census outcomes to the democratic process and elections to how local government works. The reporting provides the historical context of voting law, districting and civil rights. Boyle has spent the past year as a reporter for the News and Tribune, an Indiana publication, covering Clark and Floyd counties in the southern part of the state. In that time, he focused on the operations of local governing bodies, ranging from those of the smallest towns to the largest cities. His first tenure at the newspaper lasted from 2016 to 2017, serving as the education reporter during school board shakeups and major referenda. In between stints, Boyle took a deep dive into the world of health care as an investigative reporter at Berkeley Research Group in New York City. His interest in reporting started at Indiana University Southeast, where he wrote for a number of magazines and the student newspaper, the Horizon.

Jackie Botts

Jackie is a data and multimedia reporter originally from Southern California. She has interned on the Data and Enterprise desk for Reuters News and for her hometown paper, The Santa Barbara Independent. Her reporting on immigration, the environment, and wildfires has appeared in Pacific Standard, SFGate, Public Radio International’s “The World,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Peninsula Press and the Half Moon Bay Review. A graduate of Stanford University’s master’s program in journalism, she received the James S. Robinson student journalism award for a multimedia series that documented the impacts of wildfires on immigrant communities in Northern California in 2017. The California legislature’s treatment of poverty issues Jackie covers poverty with a legislative and data focus as part of “The California Divide.” Poverty is the biggest coverage gap in the state. In response to this, CALmatters, McClatchy’s five California news organizations and the 25 Digital First newsrooms have created a news hub with a collaboration project on the topic. “The California Divide” is an unprecedented news partnership that combines the strengths of respected news-gathering organizations across the state. The shared goal is to build a sustainable and replicable model for data-driven, change-making journalism in this critically underserved coverage area. Report for America has teamed up with three of the new hub’s newsrooms to offer three new corps member placements: CALmatters in Sacramento, The Fresno Bee in Fresno and The Mercury News in San Jose.

Devna Bose

Devna Bose reports for The Charlotte Observer where she focuses on underserved, underreported communities including the poor, minorities, immigrants and those who identify as LGBTQ. Bose worked as an education reporter in Newark for Chalkbeat during her first year of service for Report for America. She has also worked as a multimedia journalist for newspapers across Mississippi. She interned at the Neshoba Democrat, Jackson Free Press, Meridian Star and Oxford Eagle. She has covered city government, mental health, the LGBTQ community and other issues. She attended the University of Mississippi, where she served as Managing Editor of the student-run publication, The Daily Mississippian. She has won several awards for her feature writing, photography and design from the Associated Press, Society of Professional Journalists, Southeastern Journalism Conference and the Mississippi Press Association.