Illinois

Atavia Reed

Atavia Reed reports on Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods for Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit news site dedicated to covering the city’s neighborhoods. Previously, Reed was a reporter at the Chicago Tribune Media Group covering suburban news for the Pioneer Press, including stories on the pandemic’s effect on senior living and education. A multimedia journalist, Reed says she was once described as “too nosey for her own good” and decided to make a career out of it. She’s covered culture and news for USA Today, VICE, the Chicago Tribune, South Side Weekly and the Chicago Reader. Reed holds a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she was the assistant editor for the school’s culture magazine, Buzz, contributed a narrative feature to the local paper and spent a semester studying dramatic writing at New York University.

Cheyanne Daniels

Cheyanne M. Daniels reports for the Chicago Sun-Times, covering the city's South and West Side neighborhoods. She hails from the south suburbs of Chicago, and earned her master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 2021, specializing in politics, policy and foreign affairs reporting. As a grad student, Daniels reported on politics and policies affecting disenfranchised and minority communities, such as Illinois inmates' and their response to the pandemic and vaccines. Daniels' work has been published in the Wisconsin State Journal, the Grio, South Side Weekly, and by UPI. Previously, she was a research scholar for the Journalism, Ethics and Democracy Institute at Notre Dame. Daniels holds a bachelor's in journalism from Illinois' North Central College, where she served as news editor of The Chronicle and NCClinked, its online news site.

Block Club Chicago

Block Club Chicago is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to covering Chicago’s neighborhoods. The news organization’s mission is to cover the city through a truly block-level lens that encourages people to get involved at a local level—whether that’s through campaigning for a local school council seat or trying a family-owned restaurant instead of a chain. Block Clubs seeks to build community through ground-level reporting of the city’s neighborhoods.

Chicago Sun-Times

The Chicago Sun-Times is the legendary news voice of Chicago’s working class. The news organization was recently acquired by a diverse consortium of philanthropists, business leaders and Chicago area labor organizations.

Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting

The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting is an award-winning investigative news site based in Champaign, Illinois. It serves the public by providing in-depth journalism on agribusiness and related topics and issues. It also seeks to provide the education and training of journalists and students to improve the quality and breadth of news coverage of agribusiness.The Midwest Center predominantly covers issues throughout 12 states in the heartland of the U.S, with a frequent focus on Illinois and rural communities.

Northern Public Radio – WNIJ

The mission of Northern Public Radio is to enrich, inspire and inform adults in northern Illinois through programs and services that share ideas, encourage thought, give pleasure and create community. We are a member station for National Public Radio (NPR) and create opportunities throughout the year to work with reporters at all stages of their careers. The challenge and opportunity of our reach is the large geographic area we serve; from the rolling hills of northwestern Illinois as far as the Mississippi River, north to the southern Wisconsin border, south to the beauty of the Illinois Valley and Starved Rock state park near LaSalle, with an urban center of Rockford and the educational hub of Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. The urban/rural divide allows us to provide perspectives of scope, scale, and context to how issues affect our listeners in these different landscapes that is not replicated by TV and newspapers given their smaller geographic reach.

Raymon Troncoso

Raymon Troncoso covers the Illinois statehouse for Capitol News Illinois, with a focus on legislation and issues affecting ethnic communities, minority populations, distressed communities and rural areas. Previously, while attending the University of Florida, he covered local politics and elections, among other things, as a student journalist with WUFT. He was also a Morning Edition host and producer at WUFT TV’s First at Five PBS news show and reported on special projects, earning him Florida AP and regional RTDNA awards. Troncoso was raised in Miramar, FL, where he has been a volunteer wrestling coach at American Senior High School in Hialeah.

Capitol News Illinois

Capitol News Illinois is a news service operated by the Illinois Press Foundation that directly addresses the shrinking press corps at the Statehouse. The mission of Capitol News Illinois is to provide credible and unbiased coverage of Illinois state government, including daily coverage of the Legislature including committee hearings; state agencies and issues; state office holders; and the Illinois Supreme Court and legal matters. Our content is distributed free to nearly 450 daily and non-daily newspapers statewide. Since the news service was launched Jan. 28, 2019, content produced by CNI has been published in 363 Illinois newspapers with a total circulation of more than 1.9 million.

Rita Oceguera

Rita Oceguera covers communities that ring Chicago, including Aurora, Cicero, Elgin, Joliet and Waukegan, for Injustice Watch. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Northwestern University, where she studied social justice and investigative reporting and focused on a range of Latino issues. During her internship at The Bubble in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oceguera dove deep into the inequalities that women face as soccer players and sharpened her skills as a video editor. She then worked with The Chicago Reporter to examine the spread of business vacancies in Chicago and analyzed a prosperous Latino neighborhood. Her partnership with The Chicago Reporter led her into an investigation of the complexities that low income students face when applying to colleges. Originally from Aurora, Oceguera now lives in Chicago with her fiancé, her pet axolotl (a.k.a. a Mexican walking fish) and an abundance of plants.

Injustice Watch

Founded in 2015, Injustice Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan journalism organization that conducts in-depth research exposing institutional failures that obstruct justice and equality. Our work largely focuses on the justice system, individuals who are poorly served by the system, and the policies that perpetuate inequities within the system. Much of our work focuses on how justice is meted out in Cook County; however, we occasionally take on stories outside our primary coverage area that are consistent with our mission. Along with our primary commitment to investigative journalism, Injustice Watch mentors and trains the next generation of reporters through robust internship and fellowship programs. We also partner with communities to create opportunities for discourse and dialogue around our journalism, and experiment with creative, human-centered forms of storytelling.