California

Black Voice News

A property of Voice Media Ventures, Black Voice News focuses on advocacy, solutions-oriented and data-driven reporting. The publication has addressed issues including disparities in health, education, police violence, social justice and civil rights battles. It has chronicled some of the most important stories impacting the lives of Black Californians, and given “voice” to the community while expanding its scope of civic involvement.

CapRadio & Sacramento Observer

CapRadio is Sacramento’s NPR affiliate, serving metropolitan and rural communities in Northern California since 1979. A nonprofit, its mission is news and information public service that helps people make sense of issues and navigate their lives. The Sacramento Observer Newspaper has been publishing in the city and region since November 1962. The founding of the newspaper was born out of the need to address issues of importance to the African American community. The weekly newspaper has been named the nation’s best Black newspaper six times by the National Newspaper Publishers Association.

Victorville Daily Press

This reporter is based at the weekly Desert Dispatch in Barstow, owned by Gannett. The California News Desert Initiative aims to promote content sharing among partners so residents in under-covered communities get the news they need.   

San José Spotlight

San José Spotlight is a nonprofit news organization dedicated to independent political and business reporting. Its mission is to change the face of local journalism by building a community-supported newsroom that ignites civic engagement, educates citizens and strengthens our democracy. Its coverage area includes San Jose, Santa Clara and the county of Santa Clara.

Laurence Du Sault

Laurence Du Sault covers childhood poverty in San Jose and the Bay Area as part of “The California Divide” project. Before coming to the Mercury News she covered the coronavirus pandemic as a stringer for the New York Times and as a researcher for the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she investigated police criminality for the IRP as part of a statewide coalition of news organizations examining California law enforcement. Du Sault is a recipient of the Society of Professional Journalist’s James Madison Student Journalist Freedom of Information Award, a fellow for the National Institute for Climate Education, as well as a recipient of the Randy Shilts Award for Exceptional Reporting. At Berkeley, she wrote magazine features on the environment and Indigenous affairs, reporting from Native American communities in the Golden State. After completing an internship at CIBL 101,5, public radio in Montreal, Du Sault lived and freelanced in Mexico for a year, where she perfected her Spanish and taught children in Mérida. She grew up in a strictly French-speaking home in Canada and moved to Australia at 18 to learn English. She is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal. 

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.  

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.

Nadia Lopez

Nadia Lopez covers Latino issues in the San Joaquin Valley for The Fresno Bee. Before that, she worked as a city hall reporter for San José Spotlight, where she covered politics, government, the housing crisis and homelessness. Her groundbreaking stories have led to shifts in local elections and policy changes. She has won several awards, including two California Journalism Awards in the writing and land-use categories for a story that involved spending the night on an overnight bus that homeless residents used as shelter and for covering displacement in the city’s historic East Side. She grew up in Chula Vista, California, a border town. She received her B.A. from San Francisco State University.

Ashley Wong

Ashley Wong reports for The Sacramento Bee, concentrating on the diverse Asian American communities that make up some 20 percent of the city’s residents. She has covered the Covid-19 outbreak in Michigan as a freelance reporter for Bridge Magazine, as well as statehouse politics in Washington, D.C. as an intern for the Center for Public Integrity. She has also covered local news, Silicon Valley and higher education in the San Francisco Bay Area through internships at East Bay Express and USA Today. In college, she was a news editor at The Daily Californian, the University of California-Berkeley’s independent newspaper, where she won a First Place Society of Professional Journalists Award for her story on a conservative nonprofit backed by powerful GOP donors in 2018. Born and raised in the Detroit suburbs, she is a 2019 graduate of the University of California-Berkeley.

Chris Ehrmann

Chris Ehrmann reports for SpectrumNews 1, where he focuses on how decisions made by local governments impact the environment. He is currently a Report for America corps member with The Associated Press in Hartford, Connecticut. An Emmy-nominated journalist, documentary filmmaker and photographer, he has worked for The Associated Press in Michigan and Connecticut, covering politics, crime, criminal justice and mental health reform. Additionally, he has reported on city and county government and environmental issues in Oregon and Michigan with other news outlets. Born and raised in the Detroit area, he graduated in 2016 from Wayne State University where he was a member of the Journalism Institute for Media Diversity, which focused on increasing minority hires in newsrooms and on journalism professionalism. While in Oregon, he filmed, edited and produced two documentaries on homelessness and mental health reform, one of which was nominated for a Pacific Northwest Emmy. Recently while at The AP in Connecticut, he wrote about what life was like in New Rochelle, New York, the epicenter early on of Covid-19 in New York state.