2021-2022

Chris Welter

Chris Welter reports for WYSO, the NPR station covering the greater Dayton, Ohio, area where he focuses on climate change and its impact on southwest Ohio and explores possible solutions. Welter is an Ohio lifer. He will graduate with a self-designed degree in environmental sciences from Antioch College in June 2020. He did boots-on-the-ground conservation work at farms and conducted extensive policy research on land-use issues in southwest Ohio as a Miller Fellow with the non-profit organization, Tecumseh Land Trust. He was editor-in-chief of Antioch College’s independent community newspaper, The Record. He also worked as a paralegal at a criminal defense firm in Chicago and a bankruptcy center in Philadelphia through the college’scooperative education department. He is originally from Columbus, Ohio. Chris has two cats, Beaver and Franklin, and is an avid disc golfer playing in tournaments across the country.  

Juanpablo Ramirez

Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco covers substandard housing and police-community relations for WNIJ Radio in Illinois. An audio producer and journalist based out of Chicago, Ramirez-Franco has been a bilingual facilitator at the StoryCorps office in Chicago. As a civic reporting fellow at City Bureau, a non-profit news organization that focuses on Chicago’s South Side, he produced print and audio stories about the Pilsen neighborhood. Before that, he was a production intern at the Third Coast International Audio Festival and the rural America editorial intern at In These Times magazine. Ramirez-Franco grew up in northern Illinois, He is a graduate of Knox College.

Kyeland Jackson

Kyeland Jackson covers a number of issues for Twin Cities Public Television in St. Paul, Minnesota, including the causes and effects of racial disparities. He holds bachelor’s and graduate degrees in communications from the University of Louisville and has won awards from the Kentucky Associated Press Broadcasters as well as the Louisville Society of Professional Journalists. Jackson was also selected for the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporter’s Data Institute. Raised in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, Jackson was also the editor-in-chief of The Louisville Cardinal, a weekly independent newspaper at his alma mater.

Brandon Pho

Brandon Pho reports for Voice of OC, a publication in Santa Ana, California, where he covers North Central Orange County, a diverse area with thriving Korean, Vietnamese and Hispanic communities. For the past two years as an intern at Voice of OC and in writing for other publications, he has held local governments accountable. In 2019, his investigation revealed local county fair officials spending hundreds of thousands of public dollars on special dinners for themselves and uncovered a conflict-of-interest scandal involving the fair’s CEO, who was eventually fired. As the son of a Vietnamese American immigrant, Pho was senior editor for his college newspaper, The Daily Titan at Cal State Fullerton, where his work garnered first place honors at the Los Angeles Press Club and the College Media Association. His reporting has landed him on public radio, and his work has been cited in federal court. IN 2018, He won first place for Best Breaking News and second place for Best Feature Story from the College Media Association. Pho was also a Mark of Excellence finalist in 2018 for breaking news reporting from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Renee Hickman

Renee Hickman is a reporter for the Wausau Daily Herald. At the Wisconsin paper, she covers population loss and its consequences, including everything from examining the dearth of tax revenue on school districts to the difficulties staffing hospitals face during the COVID-19 pandemic. Hickman has covered local government for the Unified Newspaper Group in Verona, Wisconsin, after completing a Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine, where she researched and reported on local journalism. She has covered agriculture, foreign affairs and other topics while freelancing and interning at the NBC News Political Unit and Bloomberg BNA. In 2018, she graduated with a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, where she worked as a research assistant at Investigative Reporters and Editors, was awarded a scholarship from the White House Correspondents’ Association, and won the school’s O.O. McIntyre Writing Award. Prior to her career in journalism, Hickman worked for several years in a variety of non-profit roles and received an undergraduate degree in history from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is from Rome, Georgia.

Monique John

Monique John reports for WCPO, a TV and digital news outlet in Cincinnati where she focuses on gentrification, a topic that’s failed to receive sustained attention in the southern Ohio city. John is a writer and TV reporter with a background in covering a slew of issues in the U.S. and has worked extensively in Liberia. In 2019, she began freelancing for News 12 in New York, covering everything from business development to breaking news. Her work in Liberia dates to 2017 when she covered that country’s presidential election for the Voice of America. She also worked as a stringer for the BBC and has written for various outlets including OkayAfrica, NY1, The Root and Women’s eNews. In 2019, she received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to examine the aftermath of a sexual abuse scandal in Liberia and the African country’s laws on violence against women. John is a graduate of Fordham University.

Anthony Orozco

Anthony Orozco reports for WITF, NPR radio and PBS television stations, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he focuses on the Latino community in Redding, Lebanon and other towns and cities along the state’s Route 222 corridor. Orozco comes to the job with a body of work devoted to community storytelling, watchdog journalism and immigration coverage. He began as a reporter and later the news editor at the University of Cincinnati’s independent student newspaper, The News Record. After graduating in 2012, Orozco immediately jumped into daily news reporting at the Reading Eagle newspaper in Reading, Pennsylvania. He specialized in writing about Latino affairs, covered breaking news and eventually took a senior position as the paper’s City Hall reporter. Orozco left the newspaper in 2019 to become an independent investigative reporter, examining issues such as local water quality, as well as telling client stories for nonprofit organizations. Orozco is also an accomplished poet and performer.  

Conor Morris

Conor Morris reports for the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative focusing on poverty in the city including housing, health and education. Morris covered Appalachian southeast Ohio for the weekly newspaper The Athens News for six years. He reported on Athens County, but especially local government, the campus of Ohio University (his alma mater), cops and courts, and the social and economic issues facing the residents of Ohio’s poorest county. Morris helped guide The News toward two Newspaper of the Year awards in its division of the annual Ohio News Media Association Hooper Contest. Morris himself won six first-place Hooper awards for his reporting over the years, including for a story series about police and hospital failures in a sexual- assault investigation in Athens. Morris was born in Marietta, Ohio.

Joan Meiners

Joan Meiners reports for The Spectrum in St. George, Utah, and focuses on the consequences of growth in Cedar City. Meiners has a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Florida, where she published multiple peer-reviewed scientific articles. As a journalist, she has written about the environment for Smithsonian Magazine, Discover Magazine, Orion Magazine and New Scientist Magazine. She spent 2019 as a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network investigating pollution from the oil and gas industry in southeast Louisiana for the ‘Polluter’s Paradise’ series, which won the Bayou Brief award for Louisiana’s Best Environment Reporting of 2019. The previous year, she got her start doing newspaper writing as an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) fellow at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Before that, she produced data journalism for the award-winning series, ‘Peak Florida’ while still a graduate student.

K. Sophie Will

K. Sophie Will reports for The Spectrum in St. George, Utah, where she focuses on the major national parks in the area—Bryce Canyon, Zion, and the Grand Canyon—and the consequences of growth and tourism. Being in Utah marks a return for Will, who grew up in Draper, Utah. She is an investigative data journalist who has covered everything from local government to major human rights violations at investigative multimedia internships with NBC 10 Boston, HuffPost, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting/WGBH and The Deseret News. She has also covered daily metro news at the Boston Globe as well as climate change and women’s rights at the Thomson Reuters Foundation in London. At Boston University, where she graduated with her bachelor’s in journalism in May 2020, she was the managing editor and the pioneering in-depth and data editor at the BU News Service.