2020-2021

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.

Yvonne Boose

Yvonne Boose reports for WNIJ/Northern Public Radio in DeKalb, Illinois, where she focuses on how community members are responding to the coronavirus pandemic artistically, culturally and spiritually. Boose was already at the station, where she contributed to local reporting. For 14 years, Boose worked for Verizon as a workforce supervisor but she decided to return to journalism in 2019 by producing and contributing at WNIJ. (Yvonne interned for the Beacon-News in Aurora, Illinois, in 2009 and for the Elmhurst Cable Access Channel in Elmhurst, Illinois, in 2000. Both internships helped Yvonne realize that she needed to work as a reporter.) Joining Report for America lets her become a full-time reporter focusing on local news. Yvonne is a published poet and has a master’s degree in journalism from Roosevelt University and a bachelor’s in speech communications from Chicago State University. In December of 2019, she received a diploma in radio and television broadcast from the Illinois Media School.  

Kimberly Bojórquez

Kim Bojórquez reports for The Sacramento Bee where she covers California’s Latino communities. She notes that “as the daughter of a Guatemalan father and a Mexican mother, my parents were not keen on my choice to pursue a career in journalism. In their home countries, asking questions was looked down upon and downright dangerous.” She has covered everything from Latino lives in Utah to veterans affairs healthcare at the Deseret News, where she worked as an intern before officially joining the newspaper. Formerly, Bojórquez freelanced for the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah and interned for ABC4 in Salt Lake City. She received her B.A. in journalism and minor in Latin American studies from Utah Valley University in 2019. Bojórquez served as the editor of UVU’s student newspaper, the UVU Review, between 2017-2018. During her junior year, she was named a recipient of the Utah Headliners SPJ Sunshine Award for advocating for open records practices at her university. Before moving to the Beehive State, she was raised in North Hollywood, California.

Samuel Bojarski

Sam Bojarski covers Brooklyn, N.Y. for The Haitian Times. The new Report for America position allows him to continue working for the paper, but as a staffer. Bojarski has covered Haiti and its diaspora for the Haitian Times as a freelancer since the fall of 2018. Along with the Haitian Times staff, his work on the reporting project “Dashed Dreams: Haiti Since the 2010 Quake,” received grant funding from the Pulitzer Center. As a freelance journalist, Bojarski has covered local news in western Pennsylvania for more than two years, on behalf of Trib Total Media, BeaverCountian.com, PublicSource and other outlets in the Keystone State. He also covered the North American maritime industry for multiple trade publications. In December of 2015, he graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where he contributed to the student newspaper, The Pitt News, and interned for Pitt Magazine, the university’s alumni publication.

Seth Bodine

Seth Bodine reports for KOSU in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where he covers agriculture and rural issues on a new beat that’s aimed not only at rural Oklahomans but those in cities and suburbs who aren’t connected to farming. It’s something he knows well. Bodine covered agriculture, business and culture for KBIA, the NPR affiliate station in Columbia, Missouri. He also covered the 2020 Missouri Legislature for the Missouri Broadcasters Association and KMOX-St. Louis. Previously, he was an intern at Missouri Business Alert, Denver Business Journal and the Colorado Springs Gazette. His work has been picked up by dozens of publications, including U.S. News & World Report, The Associated Press and The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. Bodine graduated with bachelor’s degrees in journalism and English creative writing from Colorado State University and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Brandon Block

Brandon Block reports for The Olympian in Olympia, Washington, focusing on homelessness in and around the state capital and the factors that contribute to homelessness, such as mental illness and drug addiction. Block is a reporter and filmmaker who, for two years, has covered criminal justice, immigration and the environment in Baltimore. His writing has appeared in WYPR 88.1, the DCist, and the Baltimore Beat, and he fact-checked the book “I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad.” He spent the last year in Bangkok, Thailand, where he worked for an education nonprofit on a Princeton in Asia fellowship. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Film & Media Studies from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Block got his start in journalism by writing film and theater criticism for Baltimore City Paper.

Annie Berman

Annie Berman covers health care for the Anchorage Daily News. A veteran of AmeriCorps and Vista volunteer programs, Berman is a multimedia journalist who has covered breaking news, crime, culture and politics for Mission Local and KQED, both in San Francisco. She has also helped produce “The Science of Happiness,” an award-winning podcast by PRX, Her work has been published in The New York Times, KQED and The Indian Express, an English-language daily published in Mumbai. She holds a B.A. from Smith College and is graduating from the University of California’s Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in May.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows

Kate Hidalgo Bellows reports for The Island Packet, a publication on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where she focuses on the workers behind the affluent vacation destination. It’s different than some other things she’s done. She wrote about guns, rats and one nomadic bear cub as an intern for PennLive in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and reported on the fight over bike lanes as a participant in The New York Times Student Journalism Institute. A 2020 graduate of the University of Virginia, she has reported on Charlottesville, Virginia, and the university for four years, first as an enterprise reporter for The Cavalier Daily, U.Va.’s student newspaper, and then as a freelancer for Charlottesville Tomorrow, where she helped cover the Covid-19 pandemic. Her reporting at The Cavalier Daily has dealt with the aftermath of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rallies, including coverage of an anniversary protest in 2018 for which she and her team won an award from the Virginia Press Association. She is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Aja Beckham

Aja Beckham reports for DCist, a digital publication that covers the District of Columbia and the people who live there rather than the federal government. She covers minority communities east of the Anacostia River. A graduate of the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana with a degree in social work, Beckham has been a journalist in Chicago for the last three years as the Economic Justice Reporter for Free Spirit Media, which provides teens and young adults in communities of color with hands-on media production experience. She has also been an Early Career Journalist with City Bureau, a non-profit civic media platform on Chicago’s South Side. She was also an assistant to the CEO of the National Urban League. She was chosen for a State Department exchange student program in Indonesia and has also studied in China and Thailand.