Georgia

Athens Banner-Herald

Athens Banner-Herald, the only daily paper in the region, and OnlineAthens are the primary news source for the area, which includes five counties and the University of Georgia community. This news organization, owned by Gannett, regularly covers education, city government, crime, sports, culture and breaking news.

Georgia Public Broadcasting

Georgia Public Broadcasting's mission is to create high quality programs and services that educate, inform and entertain audiences. GPB TV, Radio and Digital cover all of Georgia and adjacent counties in surrounding states. Operating across all platforms, GPB News is the local host for PBS and NPR news and produces stories of regional importance from its hubs in Atlanta, Macon and Savannah. With a combined broadcast and digital audience of over 4 million, GPB News is also developing a growing presence on social media.

WABE 90.1

WABE has been Atlanta’s independent, nonprofit source of news and local stories since 1948. As greater Atlanta’s NPR station, it reaches more than half of the state's population. Its mission is to inform, inspire, reflect and empower the community by delivering fact-based journalism, essential to democracy.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is the largest newsroom in the city and has a mission to report what’s going on in the community. Its reporters uncover the truth, protect the public’s right to know, hold community leaders accountable for serving the public, and document the region’s moments, milestones and people. This news organization is owned by Cox Enterprises, a private, family owned company.

The Current

The Current is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization founded in 2020 to provide free in-depth watchdog journalism for Savannah and other coastal Georgia areas. This news organization holds the powerful to account, illuminates public threats and helps build a more engaged society built on trustworthy facts. Its governing board consists of local business and community leaders committed to solving inequality and improving lives.

Madeline Thigpen

Madeline Thigpen covers education for The Atlanta Voice in Georgia. As an independent journalist, she has reported on the school district in her hometown of South Orange, New Jersey. Her coverage tackled the district's elementary school integration plan and its struggle to reopen schools during the pandemic. She has written about parents groups that demanded that schools be reopened, and the teacher's union that undertook multiple job actions to ensure safe working conditions. Thigpen has also provided local news coverage in Elizabeth, New Jersey, writing about the city's large community of domestic workers and the intersection of labor and immigration rights that affects their community. She interned at “The Brian Lehrer Show,” a daily call-in program on WNYC, New York's leading public radio station, and for four years hosted a show on WVAU, American University's student-run radio station.

Mirtha Donastorg

Mirtha Donastorg covers innovation and start-up initiatives at historically Black colleges and universities for The Plug, a news site based in Atlanta and devoted to Black tech trends, investigative stories and breaking news. She is a journalist with experience in TV, digital and radio, and was most recently an associate producer at CNN Digital where she helped curate multiple homepage platforms, as well as craft breaking news alerts viewed by millions daily. As a researcher for CNN, Donastorg fact-checked scripts from correspondents all over the globe and most notably, reported on the conviction of an abusive Catholic priest. Outside of work, she shares her love of soul music from around the world as a host of a weekly two-hour local radio show. Donastorg grew up in Auburn, Alabama. She’s a proud alumna of North Carolina State University, and is fluent in Spanish and French.

Paradise Afshar

Paradise Afshar covers Latino and Asian immigrant communities for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Before becoming a Report for America corps member, Afshar was a producer at Fox News, working on breaking news and feature stories that were distributed to the network's affiliate stations. In South Florida, she was a web and social producer for WPLG-TV and a freelance journalist for the Miami Herald. Afshar holds a bachelor's degree in communications from Florida International University and a master's in Near Eastern and North African studies from King's College London. She has also founded a nonprofit that's focused on giving financial aid to young athletes in South Florida, and when Afshar isn't working, she's usually hiking, traveling or doing literally anything to distract herself from screen time.

Brittany McGee

Brittany McGee reports for the Ledger-Enquirer in Columbus, Georgia. McGee covers healthcare, including COVID-19, and what healthcare and the community will look like after the pandemic. She was a reporter, then assistant city and state editor for The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a co-diversity, equity, and inclusion officer for the newspaper, McGee helped develop and launch Elevate, a special section that amplifies the voices of marginalized communities. She was born and raised in Arkansas, but has called North Carolina home for years. McGee graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2021.

Kayla Renie

Kayla Renie is a photojournalist covering communities of color for the Athens Banner-Herald in Athens, Georgia. Previously, she was a photographer for the Jackson Hole News & Guide in Jackson, Wyoming. Born and raised in the Southeast, Renie was photo editor of The Red & Black, the student-run website and weekly paper at the University of Georgia. Her internships have taken her to Texas and Indiana, where she depicted childhood in rural communities and the pandemic's initial effect on a county. As an intern for The Muskegon Chronicle in Michigan, she built relationships within the community that enabled her to pursue more in-depth projects, spurring an interest in documenting family and gender dynamics and women's health issues. Renie's goal is to use the documenting of everyday moments as a way to help people to better understand what's going on in their communities and with each other.