Laura Brache

Laura Brache reports for WFAE/La Noticia, a joint project of the Charlotte, North Carolina, NPR affiliate and the largest Spanish language newspaper in North Carolina. She focuses on immigration and deportation issues affecting the area’s booming Hispanic population and engulfing local governments and police. Brache is part of the team at WFMY News in Greensboro, North Carolina that won the Regional Edward R. Murrow Award for social media for its coverage of storm damage from a series of tornados. She is a multilingual multimedia journalist from North Carolina who was born in Massachusetts and raised in the Dominican Republic. Most recently she worked as a Production Coordinator at her alma mater, the University of North Carolina Hussman School of Journalism and Media assisting in the production of special student projects. Her journey in broadcasting began at WFMY News 2 in Greensboro, where she covered breaking news, severe weather and everything in between. Brache is a member of the July 2019 cohort of the Syracuse University online Master of Science program specializing in journalism innovation. She expects to complete the program by the end of 2020.

John Boyle

John Boyle reports for WFPL News Louisville where he covers the local civics beat—from Census outcomes to the democratic process and elections to how local government works. The reporting provides the historical context of voting law, districting and civil rights. Boyle has spent the past year as a reporter for the News and Tribune, an Indiana publication, covering Clark and Floyd counties in the southern part of the state. In that time, he focused on the operations of local governing bodies, ranging from those of the smallest towns to the largest cities. His first tenure at the newspaper lasted from 2016 to 2017, serving as the education reporter during school board shakeups and major referenda. In between stints, Boyle took a deep dive into the world of health care as an investigative reporter at Berkeley Research Group in New York City. His interest in reporting started at Indiana University Southeast, where he wrote for a number of magazines and the student newspaper, the Horizon.

Devna Bose

Devna Bose reports for The Charlotte Observer where she focuses on underserved, underreported communities including the poor, minorities, immigrants and those who identify as LGBTQ. Bose worked as an education reporter in Newark for Chalkbeat during her first year of service for Report for America. She has also worked as a multimedia journalist for newspapers across Mississippi. She interned at the Neshoba Democrat, Jackson Free Press, Meridian Star and Oxford Eagle. She has covered city government, mental health, the LGBTQ community and other issues. She attended the University of Mississippi, where she served as Managing Editor of the student-run publication, The Daily Mississippian. She has won several awards for her feature writing, photography and design from the Associated Press, Society of Professional Journalists, Southeastern Journalism Conference and the Mississippi Press Association.

Kate Hidalgo Bellows

Kate Hidalgo Bellows reports for The Island Packet, a publication on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where she focuses on the workers behind the affluent vacation destination. It’s different than some other things she’s done. She wrote about guns, rats and one nomadic bear cub as an intern for PennLive in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and reported on the fight over bike lanes as a participant in The New York Times Student Journalism Institute. A 2020 graduate of the University of Virginia, she has reported on Charlottesville, Virginia, and the university for four years, first as an enterprise reporter for The Cavalier Daily, U.Va.’s student newspaper, and then as a freelancer for Charlottesville Tomorrow, where she helped cover the Covid-19 pandemic. Her reporting at The Cavalier Daily has dealt with the aftermath of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rallies, including coverage of an anniversary protest in 2018 for which she and her team won an award from the Virginia Press Association. She is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Bryan Anderson

Bryan Anderson covers the North Carolina statehouse for The Associated Press where he focuses on health care, education, and politics. Most recently, Anderson was a political reporter for The Sacramento Bee where he created and hosted the “California Nation” podcast and received an award for his investigation of numerous breakdowns of California’s Department of Motor Vehicles automatic voter registration program. He was an investigative reporting fellow for News21 where he unearthed information on how little polluters have spent to clean up the nation’s superfund sites. Anderson has won a slew of awards including being a Regional Finalist for a Society of Professional Journalist General News Reporting honor. He was an enterprise manager for the student paper at Elon University and wrote stories for North Carolina publications including The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer.

Graham Ambrose

Graham Ambrose is a reporter for the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting. Based in Louisville, Ambrose focuses on the underreported problems with youth services throughout the Bluegrass State. Ambrose covered the Iowa presidential caucuses for the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa. Previously he covered the fallout from the worst-ever flood of the Mississippi River and the hollowing out of the rural and industrial Midwest for the Dispatch-Argus, a newspaper in East Moline, Ill. He was an intern at The Boston Globe and The Denver Post. Graham has worked as a speechwriter, a public records redactor and a physics tutor, but his favorite job was youth baseball umpire. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Yale University, where he graduated summa cum laude.

Emily Allen

As a city hall reporter for the Grand Forks Herald, Emily has spent the last year covering government and politics for communities throughout northeast North Dakota and northwest Minnesota. Earlier, she interned at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis and American Public Media, where she helped produce APM podcasts like Brains On, a science podcast for kids. She earned her B.A. from the University of Minnesota. Covering state government and southern West Virginia Emily is based in Charleston, the state capital, where she helps cover the legislative session at the start of the year. She works primarily in audio. Outside of the legislative session, her focus is in the southern coalfields and other rural counties that have been identified as distressed by the Appalachian Regional Commission.

Alex Acquisto

Alex has been a reporter at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, first covering the state’s lobster and tourism industries on the midcoast, then leading the paper’s metro coverage in Bangor, before finally reporting on Maine politics in the state capital. She has uncovered problems with the Legislature’s mandatory sexual harassment training that led to the ousting of its trainer, and her reporting on the deaths of children in Maine, prompted a legislative investigation into the state’s over-burdened child services agency. Her work has earned her several first place awards in education, news analysis, and law enforcement reporting from the Maine Press Association. Born and raised in Kentucky, Alex first spent time in Maine as a canoe instructor and returned to study writing. She has also reported for the Kennebunk Post and the Forecaster, and she was a teaching artists at The Telling Room, a non-profit organization that teaches storytelling skills to Maine youth. Alex is a graduate of Western Kentucky University and the Salt Institute of Documentary Studies. Watchdog reporting on public health in Kentucky Alex focuses on the region’s health problems, exposes flaws in Kentucky’s social services programs, gives voice to people struggling to care for themselves and their loved ones and offers potential solutions to problems that have plagued the area for a century. In particular, Alex serves as a watchdog of the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services, a government agency that wields enormous power over Kentucky’s most vulnerable citizens with  little scrutiny and transparency. She is based in Lexington, but spends extensive time in the Capitol bureau, especially during legislative sessions, and reports from communities in Eastern Kentucky.  She is directed by the newspaper’s deputy editor for accountability and engagement, who has overseen numerous award-winning projects and guides the paper’s coverage of state government and Appalachian Kentucky.