2022-2023

Hosam Elattar

Hosam Elattar covers local government and the Muslim and Arab communities for Voice of OC, a digital news outlet in Orange County, California, one of the largest counties in the U.S. This new Report for America position allows him to continue working for this nonprofit publication. As a reporting fellow at Voice of OC, he covered local school districts, homelessness, affordable housing and more. Elattar, along with several colleagues, won top honors from the California News Publishers Association for their wildfire news coverage. A graduate of California State University, Fullerton, where he was a reporter and editor at the  student paper, the Daily Titan, Elattar also speaks Arabic and Spanish and has lived in Botswana, Nepal, Uganda, the Dominican Republic and India. He hopes to become a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and start his own newsroom.

Jennifer Whidden

Jenny Whidden reports on the effects of climate change on Chicago’s suburbs for the Daily Herald, based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. A second-year Report for America corps member, Whidden previously was a Statehouse reporter for New Hampshire’s Granite State News Collaborative, covering legislation related to racial justice. A native of Rolling Meadows, Illinois, Whidden holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Marquette University. There, she was managing editor of the student paper, the Marquette Tribune, which won top honors in General Excellence from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. Whidden enjoys going to the movies, reading fiction and spending time with Princeton, her cat.

Kylea Henseler

Kylea Henseler covers county government for the Ouray County Plaindealer in Ouray, Colorado. Before this, she reported on Miami Beach city government for Miami Today, and pitched in on feature stories about education, health, transportation and the environment. A graduate of the University of Miami, she was the executive editor of Distraction, a student-run lifestyle magazine, and contributed photos and reporting on a variety of topics, including the struggles of new teachers, the lineage of local drag families and volunteers who turned a Miami dump into a mountain bike park. In her downtime, Henseler enjoys training jujitsu and biking.

Mallory Gruben

Mallory Gruben reports on K-12 education in Snohomish County for The Daily Herald in Everett, Washington. Previously, she freelanced on the north and central Oregon coast, reporting primarily for the Newport News-Times and The Astorian. She started her journalism career at The Daily News in Longview, Washington, where she covered education, business and the environment. Her work has won awards from the Northwest Society of Professional Journalists. A graduate of Hastings College in Nebraska, she was editor-in-chief of the student paper and helped to save the paper from being eliminated by budget cuts. Gruben grew up in Eckley, a village of about 230 people in the northeastern part of Colorado.

Chicago Sun-Times

The Chicago Sun-Times is the legendary news voice of Chicago’s working class. The news organization was recently acquired by a diverse consortium of philanthropists, business leaders and Chicago area labor organizations.

Juanpablo Ramirez

Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco covers drinking water quality for WNIJ Radio in Illinois. This multimedia reporter focuses on the quality of the rivers and groundwater, and how climate-driven rain and flooding pose threats to life in the region north of the Illinois River.  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.

North Carolina Health News

NC Health News launched in January 2012 in response to the disappearance of people to explain this complicated topic. Our reporters each take on multiple roles. Topics include children’s health and Medicaid, oral health, mental health, rural healthcare, environmental health issues and legislative health issues. We’ve been a “virtual” newsroom, with reporters spread across the state. We have a weekly phone-in via Google Hangout and there’s almost constant communication via phone, text, email, Slack, etc. However, we’re renting a physical office in the Triangle to better accommodate meetings and provide a hub for operations.

Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting

The Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom based in Louisville with coverage focused statewide. Our mission is to protect society’s most vulnerable citizens, expose wrongdoing in the public and private sectors, increase transparency in government and hold leaders accountable. KyCIR is the creation of the nonprofit Louisville Public Media, which announced KyCIR’s formation in spring 2013. We are a part of the WFPL newsroom, an NPR affiliate.

Voice of OC

Voice of OC was established in 2009 to cover local civic news. A nonpartisan, nonprofit digital news organization, it produces fact-based news every day on the inner workings of local government and agencies. Voice of OC offers readers free coverage.

Honolulu Star-Advertiser

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser is the largest daily newspaper in Hawaii, formed in 2010 with the merger of The Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin after the acquisition of the former by Black Press, which already owned the latter.