2021-2022

Patricia Nieberg

Patty Nieberg covers the Colorado statehouse for The Associated Press, where she concentrates on energy and environmental issues. She returned to the U.S. recently after completing fellowships with The Associated Press in Jerusalem and Haaretz through the Jerusalem Press Club. She graduated from Northwestern University with a master’s in journalism with a concentration in politics and national security. During graduate school, Nieberg reported from Washington, D.C., and worked with the James Foley Foundation on U.S. hostage policy and journalist safety. Her reporting also took her to swing states for 2018 congressional races, North Carolina to cover Hurricane Florence, and Guantánamo Bay for a military commission hearing, where she focused on the facility’s healthcare system for detainees. She grew up in south Brooklyn and received her bachelor’s degree from Binghamton University.  

Mohamed Ibrahim

Mohamed Ibrahim covers the Minnesota Legislature for The Associated Press where he concentrates on energy and environmental policy. He has worked as an intern at Minnesota Public Radio News, and at the Star Tribune covering St. Paul, Minn. and its surrounding areas. He was a reporter for the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities’s student-run newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, where he covered public safety, city government and the Minnesota Legislature. Born in San Diego, Ibrahim is the child of Somali immigrants and was raised in the suburbs of Minneapolis. He earned his B.A. from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in December 2019.

Michelle Liu

Michelle was a reporting intern for the Toledo Blade, and a general assignment intern for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As a reporter for the Yale Daily News and a contributing reporter for the New Haven Independent, she shadowed canvassers in New Hampshire and covered labor unions in Connecticut. She was also a program coordinator for Yale’s Summer Journalism Program for high school students. Since joining Report for America, Liu has covered criminal justice for Mississippi Today. The Institute for Non-Profit News named Michelle’s reporting on the spike of prison deaths in Mississippi as one of the “Best in Nonprofit News” in 2018. Her continued reporting on this and other stories not only helped lead the MDOC to invite the FBI to get involved in the investigation of these deaths, but her dogged records requests were cited by the Department of Corrections while asking the Legislature to exempt agencies from parts of the Public Records Act. More recently, the Mississippi Humanities Council invited Michelle to moderate a panel titled, “Locked Up: Criminal Justice in Mississippi.”

Casey Smith

Casey Smith covers the Indiana Legislature with a focus on state elections and education for The Associated Press. Before her time at The AP she focused on the environment, law enforcement accountability and juvenile justice as a graduate research fellow at the Investigative Program in Berkeley, Calif. She has had internships and fellowships at The Indianapolis Star, the Investigative Reporting Workshop in Washington, D.C., The Washington Post, National Geographic, USA Today and other publications. Internationally, she has reported on water quality across South America. Casey holds a master’s degree in investigative reporting and narrative science writing from the University of California/Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. She previously earned degrees in journalism, anthropology and Spanish from Ball State University in Indiana, where she also served as editor-in-chief of the school’s independent student newspaper, The Daily News. Her work has been recognized by the Society of Professional Journalists, the Hoosier State Press Association, the Associated Collegiate Press, the Indiana Collegiate Press Association and the German-American Fulbright Commission.

Piper Hudspeth Blackburn

Piper Hudspeth Blackburn covers the Kentucky statehouse for The Associated Press, where she concentrates on issues affecting Appalachia. Before joining Report For America, Hudspeth Blackburn covered politics in Washington, D.C. for audiences in upstate New York and Texas while a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill D.C. program. She grew up in Burlington Township, New Jersey, and graduated cum laude with a B.A. from the University of Southern California, where she majored in journalism and history, focusing on past and present intersections of policy, race and mass media in downtown Los Angeles. She was designated a Renaissance Scholar by the university and is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists. She received a graduate degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern in May 2020.

Anna Nichols

Anna Nichols covers the Michigan statehouse for The Associated Press, concentrating on roads, bridges and other ailing infrastructure in this Rust Belt state. The state capital is familiar terrain for Nichols, a graduate of Michigan State (in East Lansing) where, as a student journalist for the campus paper, The State News, she won national attention for her work on the sexual assault corruption scandal that engulfed USA Gymnastics and led to the conviction of team physician Larry Nassar. She has also covered welfare and criminal justice for the Michigan Advance, where she developed the paper’s human welfare beat. A veteran of local news coverage, Nichols was also a reporting Intern for MLive, and the Saginaw News & Bay City Times. Her awards include the Society of Professional Journalists Detroit Chapter 2018 Lawrence A. Laurain Scholarship, being named Michigan Press Association 2018 Foundation Scholar and winning the National College Media 2018 “Best of Show” print issue centerpiece.

Camille Fassett

Camille Fassett is a data reporter for The Associated Press based in the San Francisco Bay area. Most recently, she was a data science fellow at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, where she applied statistical analysis and machine learning to public interest data. Previously, Fassett was a reporter and researcher at Freedom of the Press Foundation, where she covered surveillance, whistleblowers and transparency issues, and co-ran the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a data project tracking press freedom violations. Fassett also covered the attacks on press freedom in Malta. She is also a member of the data and security collective Lucy Parsons Labs and a board member of the data archival group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOS). She graduated from the University of California/Berkeley.

Alejandra Martinez

Alejandra Martinez reports for KERA in Dallas as well as The Texas Newsroom, a journalism collaboration among the public radio stations of Texas and NPR, where she covers the impact of Covid-19 and its associated economic fallout on marginalized communities. Before joining Report for America, Martinez was a producer at WLRN, South Florida's NPR station where she covered immigration, marginalized communities, and the local arts scene. She would book, write, and produce stories for and the station’s daily talk show, “Sundial,” and she was part of Public Radio International’s (PRI) “Every 30 Seconds” election project, a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond. A native Texan, Martinez began her broadcast career working with KUT, Austin’s NPR station, first as an intern and later a producer. In Texas, Martinez participated in NPR’s Next-Generation Radio project, a week-long journalism boot camp, where she covered Houston’s recovery post-Hurricane Harvey in 2018. She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism in 2017.  

Michelle Griffith

Michelle Griffith reports for The Forum of Fargo-Moorhead in North Dakota. She focuses on the decline and rise of rural America, told through a North Dakota lens, including coverage of economic development, jobs the people who make up these communities. Griffith covered breaking news and enterprise stories while interning at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press. She was the Campus Activities Editor for the Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota’s independent student newspaper, where she oversaw coverage on topics like diversity, student life and research. Griffith was also a founding member of the Minnesota Daily’s Content Diversity Board, which analyzed the paper’s coverage of minority communities and trained reporters on best practices for covering marginalized groups. She grew up in Buffalo, Minnesota and graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2020 with a degree in journalism.

Sarah Kim

Sarah Y. Kim reports for WYPR in Baltimore, where she focuses on the city’s housing and health crisis. Kim has spent her senior year at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore as editor-in-chief of The Johns Hopkins News-Letter, one of the oldest student newspapers in the country. It was through The News-Letter that Sarah fell in love with Baltimore and decided to pursue a career in local journalism. After becoming a staff writer in 2017, she served as news editor and opinions editor. Sarah is also a paid freelance researcher for Baltimore magazine and was an editorial intern there in the summer of 2018. Though born in Walnut Creek, California, Sarah grew up in South Korea for over 12 years, where she developed a passion for storytelling. She is an avid writer of fiction and poetry and graduates this spring with a B.A. in creative writing and international studies. Sarah is also an intern at the Baltimore division of international nonprofit Impact Hub, where she continues to expand her growing network of local entrepreneurs, activists and community members. She is excited to continue her career in journalism in Baltimore, the city she calls home.