California

The Sun-Gazette

The Sun-Gazette is 117-year-old weekly newspaper covering municipal and county government, disadvantaged communities, local schools, and business trends in Tulare County in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley of California. The newspaper’s mission is to provide informational, unbiased coverage in a media devoid, geographically expansive and poverty-plagued area between the state’s metropolitan media hubs of San Francisco and Los Angeles.  

Lana Cohen

Lana Cohen reports for The Mendocino Voice in Boonville, California, where she focuses on the effect of environmental regulation on salmon runs, wildfires, the economy and other issues. A reporter from Brooklyn, New York, Cohen covered the environment, conservation and climate politics during fellowships at WhoWhatWhy, an investigative newsroom, and the National Audubon Society. Her work explored everything from natural disasters to water rights to the newest green technology. She previously worked in public health and environmental justice communications with WE ACT for Environmental Justice in Harlem. At Colorado College, Cohen majored in environmental science and concentrated on weather and air quality.

Jackie Botts

Jackie is a data and multimedia reporter originally from Southern California. She has interned on the Data and Enterprise desk for Reuters News and for her hometown paper, The Santa Barbara Independent. Her reporting on immigration, the environment, and wildfires has appeared in Pacific Standard, SFGate, Public Radio International’s “The World,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, Peninsula Press and the Half Moon Bay Review. A graduate of Stanford University’s master’s program in journalism, she received the James S. Robinson student journalism award for a multimedia series that documented the impacts of wildfires on immigrant communities in Northern California in 2017. The California legislature’s treatment of poverty issues Jackie covers poverty with a legislative and data focus as part of “The California Divide.” Poverty is the biggest coverage gap in the state. In response to this, CALmatters, McClatchy’s five California news organizations and the 25 Digital First newsrooms have created a news hub with a collaboration project on the topic. “The California Divide” is an unprecedented news partnership that combines the strengths of respected news-gathering organizations across the state. The shared goal is to build a sustainable and replicable model for data-driven, change-making journalism in this critically underserved coverage area. Report for America has teamed up with three of the new hub’s newsrooms to offer three new corps member placements: CALmatters in Sacramento, The Fresno Bee in Fresno and The Mercury News in San Jose.

Kimberly Bojórquez

Kim Bojórquez reports for The Sacramento Bee where she covers California’s Latino communities. She notes that “as the daughter of a Guatemalan father and a Mexican mother, my parents were not keen on my choice to pursue a career in journalism. In their home countries, asking questions was looked down upon and downright dangerous.” She has covered everything from Latino lives in Utah to veterans affairs healthcare at the Deseret News, where she worked as an intern before officially joining the newspaper. Formerly, Bojórquez freelanced for the Daily Herald in Provo, Utah and interned for ABC4 in Salt Lake City. She received her B.A. in journalism and minor in Latin American studies from Utah Valley University in 2019. Bojórquez served as the editor of UVU’s student newspaper, the UVU Review, between 2017-2018. During her junior year, she was named a recipient of the Utah Headliners SPJ Sunshine Award for advocating for open records practices at her university. Before moving to the Beehive State, she was raised in North Hollywood, California.

Nada Samir Atieh

Nada Atieh is a reporter for the Redding Searchlight in Redding, California, which covers areas north of Sacramento. She focuses on education, childhood trauma and the achievement gap. An Arab-American journalist from Dallas, Texas, Atieh has been working as a journalist in the Middle East since 2017. She has reported on the military escalation in northwest Syria and the humanitarian crisis created by the Syrian civil war within Syria. Previously, she trained with Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), where she coordinated the awards distribution at the 2018 annual conference. She has reported about the economic climate in Jordan for Venture magazine. Atieh has also covered the Jordanian government’s initiative to bring employment services to refugee camps, the impact of tax hikes on food producers in Jordan, and the growth of air connectivity throughout the Middle East. She is fluent in conversational Arabic and proficient in Modern Standard Arabic. She holds a B.A. from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she studied broadcast journalism and communications.