2020-2021

Abbey Marshall

Abbey Marshall reports for The Devil Strip, a community-owned, independent news outlet in Akron, Ohio, where she focuses on how economic trends affect ordinary citizens. Marshall is a 2020 graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, where she studied on a full academic scholarship awarded to a student pursuing a career in reporting. Throughout her collegiate career, she completed two internships at The Columbus Dispatch as a metro reporter and web producer. She recently returned from Washington, D.C., where she covered breaking news as an intern at Politico. Having worked at a nonprofit in Mumbai, studied French and media in Aix-en-Provence and covered politics in the nation’s capital, she ultimately realized she missed the state she calls home and the fight for solid local journalism.

Adam Willis

Adam Willis reports for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead in North Dakota, where he covers statewide business issues and elections. Before moving to North Dakota, Willis was a freelance journalist and researcher based in Washington, D.C. His freelance work has covered religion, human rights, higher ed and regional politics and has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Politico Magazine, The Boston Globe and other national publications. In the fall of 2018 and spring of 2019, he reported on the response of the Catholic Church to President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly war on drugs in the Philippines, a project supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Willis has also worked as a Washington reporting fellow for The Texas Tribune, where he covered Texas politics on Capitol Hill. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia.

Mary Norkol

Mary Norkol reports for The Sun News, the newspaper based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where she focuses on homelessness. This is an underreported topic in the resort area with unique aspects including family members who follow their retiree relatives to the region but don’t have enough money for housing. Norkol wrote features for “The FBI Files” and “Murals and Mosaics” projects while working as an intern at the Chicago Sun-Times and worked on the investigative team during an internship with CBS in Chicago. She was editor-in-chief of Loyola University Chicago’s independent student newspaper, which won first place in its general excellence category by the Illinois College Press Association. Norkol was recognized for her work on a podcast covering the Mercy Hospital shooting and multimedia reporting on sexual assault solve rates in Chicago. A true Midwesterner, Norkol grew up in Stillwater, Minnesota, and spends her vacations and holidays in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Nadia Lopez

Nadia Lopez covers Latino issues in the San Joaquin Valley for The Fresno Bee. Before that, she worked as a city hall reporter for San José Spotlight, where she covered politics, government, the housing crisis and homelessness. Her groundbreaking stories have led to shifts in local elections and policy changes. She has won several awards, including two California Journalism Awards in the writing and land-use categories for a story that involved spending the night on an overnight bus that homeless residents used as shelter and for covering displacement in the city’s historic East Side. She grew up in Chula Vista, California, a border town. She received her B.A. from San Francisco State University.

Megan Taros

Megan Taros reports for The Arizona Republic where she concentrates on the Latino and African-American communities in South Phoenix. Most recently, Taros covered Latino affairs across an eight-county swath in Twin Falls, Idaho, where she launched the beat at the local paper. There she was a part of numerous community engagement efforts that included getting Latino students interested in media, listening sessions and launching a series on representation in education, politics, business and health. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she covered health disparities, income inequality and immigration in the Latino communities of Corona and Elmhurst, Queens, New York. She’s covered education and local government in southern New Jersey, San Francisco and her native Los Angeles.

Stephanie Garcia

Stephanie García reports for The Baltimore Sun focusing on Latinos, the fastest-growing ethnic group in the Maryland city. She is a former news assistant for PBS NewsHour and a foreign desk intern for The Independent. Garcia spent two years teaching English in Madrid. As an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in Arizona, she was an Adult Education Coordinator assisting refugees in Phoenix. Originally from Queens, New York, Garcia graduated magna cum laude from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.

Tatyana Turner

Tatyana Turner reports for The Baltimore Sun, where she focuses on poor and working class African-American communities that have often been neglected in media coverage. This new beat tells the stories of these neighborhoods from the front lines. It’s a great fit for Turner, who was inspired by her upbringing in the South Bronx and began her career in journalism writing for her hometown newspaper, the Norwood News, where she covered issues surrounding public housing, poverty, gentrification and land-use. Turner was honored by the New York Press Association for in-depth reporting and best feature series after exposing the fears and frustrations of tenants living under New York City’s most notorious landlord. She was also recognized by the National Association of Black Journalists in 2018 for community journalism after creating a video series that highlighted trailblazers in the Bronx. Turner received her B.A. from Temple University and her M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Daniel Jin

Danny Jin writes for the Berkshire Eagle, where he covers the Massachusetts Legislature and government for readers in the western part of the state. This coverage has, until now, been sorely lacking: Berkshire County is in Massachusetts but doesn’t get local television news from Boston. Instead, the county gets TV news channels from Albany, New York, that don’t cover the Berkshires. Jin knows the area well. He was an intern for the Eagle and The Christian Science Monitor in Boston. And he went to college in western Massachusetts where he was editor-in-chief of The Williams Record, Williams College’s independent student newspaper. At the Record, he reported on low morale and pay disparities among college staff. During his first stint at the Eagle in 2018, he wrote local arts and feature stories. As a freelancer, he has also contributed to the Columbia Journalism Review. At Williams, he majored in American studies and rode for the cycling team. His parents emigrated from China following the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Ceili Doyle

Ceili Doyle reports for The Columbus Dispatch, focusing on rural issues. The Dispatch’s readership area includes a large swath of Appalachia and Doyle covers it all, from health care to mining to transportation. She covered crime and public health — writing about police-community relations, mental health and health care policies — and contributed to breaking news and enterprise coverage of the Dayton, Ohio mass shooting during an internship with The Dispatch. She served as managing editor of Miami University of Ohio’s award-winning, independent student-run weekly, The Miami Student. In college, Doyle’s focus as a reporter was on crime, sexual assault and alcohol abuse. She also established and supervised The Student’s branch of audio journalism. Her work at Miami garnered her multiple first-place Mark of Excellence awards, presented by the Society of Professional Journalists. She graduated from Miami in May 2020 with B.A. in journalism and political science. Doyle is from Willow Springs, Illinois.

Jazzlyn Johnson

Jazzlyn Johnson reports for The Community Voice, a publication that focuses on African-American communities. While The Voice began in Wichita, Kansas, it has expanded to include Kansas City, Missouri, where Johnson focuses on violent crime, affordable housing and other issues of concern. Before this, she was an editorial intern for the Outdoor Writers Association of America’s membership magazine Outdoors Unlimited. She has also worked with Garden City Harvest, a local nonprofit in Missoula, Montana, as a public outreach intern. While earning her B.A. at the University of Montana School of Journalism, Johnson covered Montana’s legislation surrounding the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s crisis. Johnson’s reporting on the legislature for the Montana Native News Project sparked national attention and she was consulted for one of MTV’s True Life Crime episodes. The project as a whole is a finalist for an Online Journalism Award.