Ohio

Ellen Wagner

Ellen Wagner reports on municipal services and budget cuts for Mahoning Matters, a new collaboration between Google and McClatchy news based in Youngstown, Ohio. Wagner knows Ohio. She covered health, local events, and crime as a metro intern at The Columbus Dispatch last summer. She was the editor-in-chief of The Post, an independent student newspaper at Ohio University and in the college town of Athens in the southern part of the state. Wagner also covered crime, courts and police in Athens during her four years at The Post. She graduated from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in the spring with a major in journalism news and information and a certificate in Italian studies. She is from Westlake, a suburb outside of Cleveland. Wagner, along with the other executive editors of The Post, won Society of Professional Journalists’ 2019 Mark of Excellence Award for editorial writing.

Chris Welter

Chris Welter reports for WYSO, the NPR station covering the greater Dayton, Ohio, area where he focuses on climate change and its impact on southwest Ohio and explores possible solutions. Welter is an Ohio lifer. He will graduate with a self-designed degree in environmental sciences from Antioch College in June 2020. He did boots-on-the-ground conservation work at farms and conducted extensive policy research on land-use issues in southwest Ohio as a Miller Fellow with the non-profit organization, Tecumseh Land Trust. He was editor-in-chief of Antioch College’s independent community newspaper, The Record. He also worked as a paralegal at a criminal defense firm in Chicago and a bankruptcy center in Philadelphia through the college’scooperative education department. He is originally from Columbus, Ohio. Chris has two cats, Beaver and Franklin, and is an avid disc golfer playing in tournaments across the country.  

Monique John

Monique John reports for WCPO, a TV and digital news outlet in Cincinnati where she focuses on gentrification, a topic that’s failed to receive sustained attention in the southern Ohio city. John is a writer and TV reporter with a background in covering a slew of issues in the U.S. and has worked extensively in Liberia. In 2019, she began freelancing for News 12 in New York, covering everything from business development to breaking news. Her work in Liberia dates to 2017 when she covered that country’s presidential election for the Voice of America. She also worked as a stringer for the BBC and has written for various outlets including OkayAfrica, NY1, The Root and Women’s eNews. In 2019, she received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting to examine the aftermath of a sexual abuse scandal in Liberia and the African country’s laws on violence against women. John is a graduate of Fordham University.

Conor Morris

Conor Morris reports for the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative focusing on poverty in the city including housing, health and education. Morris covered Appalachian southeast Ohio for the weekly newspaper The Athens News for six years. He reported on Athens County, but especially local government, the campus of Ohio University (his alma mater), cops and courts, and the social and economic issues facing the residents of Ohio’s poorest county. Morris helped guide The News toward two Newspaper of the Year awards in its division of the annual Ohio News Media Association Hooper Contest. Morris himself won six first-place Hooper awards for his reporting over the years, including for a story series about police and hospital failures in a sexual- assault investigation in Athens. Morris was born in Marietta, Ohio.

The Devil Strip

The Devil Strip is an independent community news organization that’s served the greater Akron, Ohio area for almost five years. This fall, we’ll become a community-owned local news cooperative to give residents a say in how our organization runs. This is how we’re aligning the incentives of our business and operational structure with the values of our mission and our journalism. In effect, instead of unionizing our newsroom, we’re unionizing our audience.

The Devil Strip

The Devil Strip is an independent community news organization that’s served the greater Akron, Ohio area for almost five years. This fall, we’ll become a community-owned local news cooperative to give residents a say in how our organization runs. This is how we’re aligning the incentives of our business and operational structure with the values of our mission and our journalism. In effect, instead of unionizing our newsroom, we’re unionizing our audience.

The Associated Press

The Associated Press is a global news agency that began 172 years ago as a cooperative of five New York City newspapers. With 263 locations in more than 100 countries, AP provides journalism to roughly 15,000 media outlets around the world. AP sets standards for ethics and excellence, and has won 52 Pulitzer Prizes, including the 2016 gold medal for Public Service for an investigation into labor abuses in the seafood industry, reports that freed more than 2,000 slaves. AP’s seven news bureaus in the northeast U.S. provide vital local and regional news to 378 newsrooms.

WYSO Public Radio

Our role, beyond serving as the NPR affiliate for our region, is to share voices that are often excluded or marginalized in other outlets. To cite a few examples, we share the stories of families impacted by the opioid crisis; interviews with elderly African-American residents of Dayton’s west side who have chosen to age in place in their homes; and in-studio performances local musicians. Our FM signal reaches 12 counties in southwest Ohio. To the south we serve the growing area between Dayton and Cincinnati; to the north, Sidney, Ohio; to the west, Richmond, Indiana; and to the east the outskirts of Columbus. Our coverage area includes urban, rural and small towns.

WCPO

WCPO is an innovative and forward-looking news organization covering 25 counties across three states centered around Cincinnati. WCPO has a history of enterprise journalism and innovation that stems from the organization's early days as a TV station on to 2014 when the E.W. Scripps Company launched an extensive digital newsroom within the TV station and the nation's first and only local TV station with a paywall and paid membership program. The newsroom has since evolved by combining that digital newsroom and the existing broadcast newsroom into a dynamic team focused on enterprise and investigative journalism on TV and digital platforms.  

Cleveland.com

Cleveland.com is the largest news website in Ohio. Our primary audience lies in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, but we serve the entire northeast Ohio area. An important part of our mission is to cover underserved and under-represented communities with depth, understanding, and empathy. To that end, we are part of a regional journalism collaborative aimed at covering issues of poverty and social justice.