2021-2022

Maria Sestito

Maria Sestito reports for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, where she focuses on issues facing the areas exploding senior citizen population. Before earning her master’s degree at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in May 2020, Sestito was the public safety reporter at the Napa Valley Register. While there, she covered murder trials and the North Bay Wildfires. She also started her own lifestyle column called “Jersey Girl.” Before moving to California, Sestito worked at The Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. as a photographer and general assignment reporter. She is originally from New Jersey and received a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Rutgers University in 2012. Sestito has won several California News Publishers Association awards for Best Writing, Best Column, and Breaking News. She is a recipient of the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for the study of Arabic and a Bloomberg-UNC-Berkeley Business Journalism Diversity Fellow. At Berkeley, she won the Dean’s Merit Fellowship.  

Elizabeth Moomey

Liz Moomey reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky where she focuses on watchdog reporting in eastern Kentucky, specifically Pike County. She was a reporter for the Salisbury Post in North Carolina where she covered the city and politics, along with the town of Landis. Her reporting sparked an embezzlement investigation into two town employees. She previously worked at the North State Journal as a reporter and page designer. Moomey has been awarded by the North Carolina Press Association for feature writing, news enterprise reporting and design. She was also a sports clerk and writer for the News & Observer and a web producer for Spectrum News, both in Raleigh, North Carolina. Liz was the editor of North Carolina State University’s yearbook Agromeck, which won the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s Gold Crown award. She is a graduate of North Carolina State University and serves on the annual publications advisory board helping to select the incoming editor of the yearbook and literary magazine.

Madeleine Cook

Madeleine Cook is a photojournalist with the Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus, Georgia, where she concentrates on the Covid-19 pandemic and its fallout. Originally from Georgia and North Carolina, she holds a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from George Washington University/Corcoran School in Washington, D.C. There, she was a Luther Rice Fellow in refugee studies and a Shatz Scholar in Photography in Jerusalem and also graduated magna cum laude. As an undergraduate, Cook interned at USA Today Visuals, NPR's Science Desk, Agence France-Presse and The Morning Call based in Allentown, Pennsylvania. After graduation, she drove cross-country to be a Pulliam Fellow at the Arizona Republic, and then to Salem, Oregon, where she was a photojournalist at the Statesman Journal taking on daily photo and video assignments, producing galleries and covering the long-term impact of homelessness in Oregon. She is an Eddie Adams Workshop XXXII 2019 Participant.

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.

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.

Yehyun Kim

Yehyun Kim is a photojournalist for The Connecticut Mirror capturing the full breadth of experience in the Constitution State. Kim has had internships with the Victoria Advocate, USA Today and Acadia National Park. She has a journalism degree from the University of Missouri/Columbia. Kim was born and raised in South Korea and studied photojournalism at the Danish School of Media and Journalism. She participated in the Eddie Adams Workshop and has a degree from Dongduk Women’s University in South Korea. She won the 74th College Photographer Of The Year Award of Excellence in General News.

Amanda Ulrich

Amanda Ulrich reports for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, where she focuses on Native American issues in Riverside and San Bernardino. Ulrich was already based in Palm Springs when she joined Report for America so she knows the area well. She has reported from the United Kingdom, Italy, the Caribbean, and in cities across the U.S., covering topics ranging from marginalized communities to environmental issues. Before relocating to Southern California in 2019, Ulrich worked as a reporter and web editor for a newspaper in the British Virgin Islands. While there, she wrote about local government and the many long-standing impacts of Hurricane Irma, which decimated the region in 2017. Ulrich started her journalism career as a reporting fellow for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in 2016. She is a graduate of Wake Forest University and hails from Vienna, Virginia.

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.