California

Annika Hom

Annika Hom reports for Mission Local, a digital and investigative news outlet based in San Francisco that covers the entire city. Hom concentrates on inequality in the city’s Mission District.  Hom worked as a freelancer following her experience as a metro journalist at the Boston Globe and a news intern at SF WEEKLY. In December 2019, she graduated from Emerson College in Boston with a degree in journalism and a minor in poetry. She was an editor and reporter for the arts section of Emerson’s independent newspaper, The Berkeley Beacon. A native of Foster City, California, she’s the daughter of a Chinese-American father and Filipina mother. She speaks fluent Spanish.

Maria Esquinca

María Esquinca is a reporter for Radio Bilingüe in Fresno, Calif, where she focuses on environmental issues in the San Joaquin Valley. A fronteriza, comfortable on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and mostly grew up across the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas. She is an M.F.A candidate at the University of Miami. She has focused her reporting on issues that affect communities of color like immigration, gentrification, and discrimination. She interned at WLRN, the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, and was a Dow Jones News Fund Business Reporting intern at Crain’s Detroit Business. As a News 21 Ethics and Excellence Fellow, she reported on lack of access to clean, drinking water in colonias along the U.S.-Mexico border. The story was re-published in outlets like The Texas Tribune and the Center for Public Integrity. During her undergraduate education, she was a reporter and editor at The Prospector, the student-run newspaper at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her stories earned her awards from the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association and the College Media Association. Her poetry has been published in Waxwing, The Florida Review, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry.

Crystal Niebla

Crystal Niebla is a reporter for the Long Beach Post in California concentrating on the underreported West Long Beach neighborhood and its large Latino, African-American and Asian communities that are physically and economically isolated from the rest of Long Beach. Before becoming a Report for America corps member, Niebla reported for and mentored young multi-media journalists at VoiceWaves, a youth-led program based in Long Beach. Before that, she freelanced for the Post, interned at San Pedro’s Random Lengths News, and served as the News Editor for the Daily 49er, the student paper at Long Beach State University. One of Niebla’s most notable accomplishments includes reporting about a local refinery expansion project that lacked political attention from Long Beach officials until she released her in-depth story. Early on she realized that coming from a poor family in South Central L.A., she could use fearless journalism to influence positive change in society.

Sebastian Echeverry

Sebastian Echeverry writes for the Long Beach Post in California where he concentrates on North Long Beach, a predominantly working-class neighborhood of almost 100,000 residents, the majority of whom are Hispanic and about one-fourth are African-American. Echeverry comes to the post with considerable experience. He was the acting publisher/ managing editor for the Signal Tribune newspaper in Long Beach in 2020. Before that position, he worked as the design editor/production manager and as a general assignment reporter covering Long Beach and Signal Hill. As an undergraduate at California State University/Long Beach, he was an intern for NBC4 Los Angeles and Telemundo 52. There, he worked with the digital team, uploading content to the website and social media pages. He’s created videos, podcasts and photo slideshows during his time reporting from major sporting events like the Grand Prix of Long Beach to breaking news such as protests and active crime scenes.

Camille von Kaenel

Camille is an environment reporter who has covered growth and development in San Diego County’s backcountry for inewsource, the aftermath of the Camp fire in Northern California for the Chico Enterprise-Record, and climate policy and politics in Washington D.C. for E&E News. Born in Switzerland and raised in California, she has a bachelor’s in international relations from the University of Geneva and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in New York.

Ricky Rodas

Ricky Rodas reports for The Oaklandside, where he focuses on immigrant-owned and operated businesses in Oakland, California. The beat covers economic and neighborhood change, barriers to entry, minimum wage struggles and much more. Rodas is a Los Angeles native who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley to Salvadorean parents, studied at California State University-L.A. and was the first investigative reporter for his campus newspaper, The University Times. During his time at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Rodas was awarded Radio Television and Digital News Association’s (RTDNA) Pete Wilson Scholarship and a Jonathan Rodgers Fellowship. He also worked as a research assistant for the Investigative Reporting Program (IRP) at Berkeley where he was part of investigations into L.A.’s s child welfare system and the national sex offender registry. Through years of listening, determination and speech therapy, he overcame a childhood stutter. A multimedia journalist, he concentrated in audio at Berkeley and has experience in radio hosting, producing audio reports, working as a studio engineer, writing breaking news and investigative reporting.

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.

Shivani Patel

Shivani Patel reports for The Ventura Star in Camarillo, California, where she focuses on education, the disparity between expenditures and outcomes and how a 2014 state school funding law is affecting children. Patel knows the Pacific Coast. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, and she has been a staff writer, assistant editor and web editor for The Malibu Times, a hyperlocal publication based in Malibu, California. She reported on everything from breaking news to public meetings and developed a beat covering public school education. Shivani won several awards for coverage of two major 2018 events: the Malibu Creek State Park shooting and the Woolsey Fire. In 2017, she graduated with a B.S. in journalism and concentration in Spanish from Boston University. Patel has won the Foot in the Door Fellowship from the L.A. Press Club and several awards from the California News Publishers Association, among other honors.

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.

Kristina Karisch

Kristina Karisch reports for The Modesto Bee and focuses on economic development and its impacts in Stanislaus County and the Northern San Joaquin Valley. She has covered politics and policy as an intern at The Washington Monthly and for the Medill News Service. She has also reported on local news for the West Seattle Herald, with a focus on transportation. Karisch graduated from Northwestern University in March with a degree in journalism and political science. She spent her time there reporting for The Daily Northwestern, where she was the paper’s city editor and managing editor. Karisch, who was born in Copenhagen to Austrian parents, grew up in Montreal and Denver and has been living in Seattle since 2016.