2026-2027

Walker Smith

Walker Smith is a visual journalist for Mainstreet Daily News in Gainesville, Florida. Before joining Report for America, Walker's work was shaped by a diverse job history, from selling cotton candy at a dirt track in high school to working on industrial fishing boats in Alaska during the COVID-19 pandemic. He draws on his blue-collar background and experience in the supply chain to examine labor and rural industry. He holds an M.A. in Visual Communication from Ohio University and completed a photojournalism internship at The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. When he’s not photographing, he plays saxophone, works on commercial fishing boats, and spends time sailing.

Rose LaForest

Rose LaForest is a multi-media journalist at Nine PBS. Prior to this role, LaForest produced video explainers for WSLS-TV in Roanoke, Virginia, as part of an experimental program testing storytelling strategies for video journalists in local newsrooms. In 2024, she earned her master’s degree in broadcast and video journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where she produced short documentaries on dementia-related wandering, juvenile incarceration, and even traveled to Argentina to cover the shifting cultural attitudes toward women in male-dominated sports. LaForest previously interned at Detroit PBS, producing stories and coordinating digital content. Her journalism career began when she found non-fiction storytelling through a film history class while studying TV and film production at Michigan State University. As she learned more about the medium, LaForest says it helped her find a natural way to become involved and contribute to her community.

Adriana Gutierrez

Prior to joining Mission Local, Adriana Gutierrez spent three years at The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, California as an education and child welfare reporter through the Report For America reporting program. During her time there, she covered 40 school districts across Sonoma County, paying close attention to the fiscal crisis of the county's largest school district, Santa Rosa City Schools. She won awards from the California News Publisher Association and California Journalism Awards for her coverage of violence on school campuses and student homelessness in Sonoma County. Gutierrez graduated from Oregon State University in 2023, where she served as the dditor-in-chief of the university's newspaper, The Daily Barometer. She also interned at The Oregonian in 2022. During her internship, she covered the business section of the metro paper, while also serving on the breaking news, education and weather desks.

Ryan Di Corpo

Prior to joining Athens County Independent, Ryan Di Corpo was managing editor of Outreach where he won a Catholic Media Award for a months-long investigation into the violent persecution of LGBTQ refugees in East Africa. He twice represented Outreach at the White House. Most recently, he has collaborated with the National Catholic Reporter on its series investigating clergy sex abuse. He is an award-winning journalist whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Guardian, Boston Magazine, U.S. Catholic and America, where he previously worked as an O'Hare Fellow. He holds a B.A. in film from Fordham University, where he was the culture co-editor of its journal-of-record, and an M.A. in journalism from Northeastern University. Di Corpo was part of a Northeastern reporting team honored at the 47th Boston/New England Emmy Awards for the best college newscast of 2023. Di Corpo was recognized at Northeastern for academic excellence and professional ethics.

Anita Li

Anita Li is the government accountability reporter at Coconut Grove Spotlight. Through Report for America, she previously covered education for the Prince William Times, where she won a Virginia Press Association award for reporting on Venezuelan teachers who lost their Temporary Protected Status. Before joining Report for America, Li interned at Minnesota Public Radio and FOX 5 DC. Her passion for highlighting underrepresented voices started when she interned at WLRN, Miami’s NPR station. Li grew up in Maryland and graduated from Northwestern University, where she reported for The Daily Northwestern. She speaks Mandarin and Spanish, and will never say no to mango pomelo sago or a good story.

Ellen Schmidt

Before joinging the Associated Press, Ellen Schmidt was a visual journalist, CatchLight Local fellow and Report for America corps member at MinnPost. Her career began while earning an undergraduate degree in journalism and art at the University of Minnesota, where she worked as a reporter, photographer and the multimedia editor at the Minnesota Daily student newspaper. Her roles there propelled her to internships at Minnesota Public Radio News, The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Duluth News Tribune and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In Nevada, her success led to five years as a staff photojournalist visualizing breaking news, community stories, enterprise coverage, the environment and major sporting events.

Savvy Sleevar

Prior to joining the Southeast Missourian, Savvy Sleevar served as a Dunn Fellow for Communications and Digital Media at the Office of the Illinois Governor. Before that, Sleevar covered rural health disparities with a cohort of reporters for the Columbia Missourian and Investigate Midwest. Her team's reporting on the intersection of pesticide use, high cancer rates and health inequities in Missouri communities earned a 2025-26 Hearst Journalism Award for Investigative Reporting. Sleevar also covered higher education for the Columbia Missourian, and she penned several feature pieces as a city life reporter for Vox Magazine. Sleevar graduated summa cum laude from the University of Missouri, earning her Bachelor of Journalism with a minor in history.

Estefanía Pinto Ruiz

Pinto Ruiz covers Latino and immigrant communities across North Carolina, focusing on democracy, immigration, and community affairs. Previously, Pinto Ruiz covered agriculture, environment, and water at KWQC TV6 News in the Quad Cities for Report for America and the Ag & Water Desk. Her reporting focused on elevating farmers’ voices and bringing awareness to the importance and difficulty of the work farmers do to feed the USA, often in an unpredictable industry. Some of her extensive reporting focused on mental health in agriculture, grain bin safety, and proposed pesticide legislation, earning her an honorable mention in the 2026 North American Agricultural Journalists writing awards. Pinto Ruiz is bilingual in English and Spanish and is a proud Colombian, which means you can often find her searching for the things she misses most as an immigrant—Colombian food and a good cup of Colombian coffee—alongside her companion on adventures, her dog Miel.

Scott White

Scott White is a digital communities reporter at The Woodford Sun as part of a pilot partnership with Press Forward Blue Grass, which trains community members to work as journalists in their hometowns. Before joining Report for America, White spent 39 years practicing law, focusing primarily on complex federal and state criminal defense and constitutional litigation. In addition to private practice, he served as the Kentucky Deputy Attorney General from 1996 through 2003. In 2022, White relocated his practice from Louisville–Lexington to Woodford County to help his longtime friend, retired Congressman Ben Chandler—the publisher of the Woodford Sun—keep the 150-year-old newspaper from going out of business. While focusing on business and community engagement, White also became a part-time reporter to help the newsroom stay afloat. He is no longer practicing law but is overseeing the paper's transition to a nonprofit organization.

Lia Salvatierra

Lia Salvatierra covers education in Northern Kentucky for LINK nky. Before reporting for LINK, Salvatierra spent two years as a local government accountability reporter for the Ouray County Plaindealer with Report for America. Her accountability work spanned a first-place investigation on an effort to secure local ownership over a federal reservoir to award-winning features on the area’s striking characters. In 2024, after graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, Salvatierra attended the Hearst National Journalism Awards Championship, where she won second place for her article on the use of artificial intelligence chatbots for psychotherapy. Her work has also appeared in WyoFile, INDY Week and other outlets in North Carolina, Wyoming and Colorado. When she's not wordsmithing, Salvatierra is learning silversmithing.