Southwest

KERA / The Texas Newsroom

NPR and Texas public radio stations collaborated to form the Texas News Hub. It’s the first step in a systemwide collaborative project to create a nationwide virtual public radio newsroom of 1,000-plus journalists. The collaboration includes two daily, hour-long statewide programs (Texas Standard and Think) and will soon include six daily statewide newscasts, and a statewide digital news desk. The Hub is working to hire and train freelance and small station reporters to provide news service to underserved communities in the state’s news deserts.

KERA / The Texas Newsroom

NPR and Texas public radio stations collaborated to form the Texas News Hub. It’s the first step in a systemwide collaborative project to create a nationwide virtual public radio newsroom of 1,000-plus journalists. The collaboration includes two daily, hour-long statewide programs (Texas Standard and Think) and will soon include six daily statewide newscasts, and a statewide digital news desk. The Hub is working to hire and train freelance and small station reporters to provide news service to underserved communities in the state’s news deserts.

Megan Taros

Megan Taros reports for The Arizona Republic where she concentrates on the Latino and African-American communities in South Phoenix. Most recently, Taros covered Latino affairs across an eight-county swath in Twin Falls, Idaho, where she launched the beat at the local paper. There she was a part of numerous community engagement efforts that included getting Latino students interested in media, listening sessions and launching a series on representation in education, politics, business and health. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she covered health disparities, income inequality and immigration in the Latino communities of Corona and Elmhurst, Queens, New York. She’s covered education and local government in southern New Jersey, San Francisco and her native Los Angeles.

Brandon Lingle

Brandon Lingle, a recently retired Air Force officer, reports for the San Antonio Express-News, where he concentrates on political dysfunction in the city’s suburbs. As a military public affairs officer, he supported media around the world including multiple embeds in Iraq and Afghanistan. His work appears in various publications including The American Scholar, The New York Times (At War), Guernica, TIME and The Normal School. His writing has been nominated for a National Magazine Award and noted in The Best American Essays. He taught in the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Department of English and Fine Arts and is a contributing editor of War, Literature and the Arts. He’s won the Air Force Association’s Gill Robb Wilson Award for the humanities and the Air Force Academy’s Outstanding Educator of the Year. Lingle is also an Olmsted Grant Recipient.  A Lompoc, California native, Lingle earned a B.S. in history from the U.S. Air Force Academy, an M.A. in English from the University of Texas at San Antonio and an M.F.A. in nonfiction from Sierra Nevada College.

Julia Sclafani

Julia Sclafani reports for Searchlight New Mexico, an independent investigative news organization, where she focuses on health issues in the state including behavioral health. Most recently, Sclafani covered city government and public safety for her hometown paper, The Daily Pilot, in Orange County, California. While there, she produced award-winning reporting on the legacy of racism in Huntington Beach following the federal indictment of four members of a local white supremacist group. Before making her way home, Sclafani completed stints covering breaking news and wildfires for the Sacramento Bee and reporting on human rights topics across Latin America for publications in the U.S. and abroad. She was a field coordinator and videographer for St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church's SEED Academy in Migori, Kenya. Sclafani earned a B.A. in Human Rights and Latin American and Caribbean Studies from Columbia University and an M.A. in Journalism from the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, where she was an inaugural member of CUNY’s Spanish-language journalism program.

Maria Mendez

María Méndez reports for Texas Public Radio from the border city of Laredo where she covers business issues from an area that is now the nation’s top trade hub. She knows Texas well. Mendez has reported on the state’s diverse communities and tumultuous politics through internships at the Austin American-Statesman, The Texas Tribune and The Dallas Morning News. She also participated in NPR’s Next Generation Radio program while studying at the University of Texas at Austin. At UT, she wrote for The Daily Texan and helped launch diversity initiatives, including two collaborative series on undocumented and first-generation college students. One of her stories for these series won an award from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She has spent the last year reporting for The Dallas Morning News as a summer breaking news intern and then as a fellow in the paper’s capital bureau in Austin. She is a native of Guanajuato in Central Mexico.

Dominic Anthony Walsh

Dominic Anthony Walsh reports for Texas Public Radio focusing on the Hill Country region. Walsh knows Texas well. Before his senior year, he reported for TPR, and continued as a stringer in the fall and an intern again in the spring. He covered local arts and culture in San Antonio, a mass casualty shooting, voting rights, and the coronavirus pandemic, plus broke the news of a billion-dollar federal lawsuit brought by a group of farmers against one of the largest logistics companies in the world. He contributed to the statewide Texas Standard and to the NPR national newscast. Dominic got his start in broadcasting and journalism at Trinity University, where he worked at KRTU 91.7 FM and the independent campus newspaper, the Trinitonian. He is from Schertz, a suburb of San Antonio. He is also a percussionist, and spent six years in the Youth Orchestras of San Antonio. He remains active in the local music community.

Shaun Griswold

Shaun Griswold reports for New Mexico In Depth, where he focuses on the Native American population in Albuquerque, the state’s largest metropolitan area. It’s one of the first beats to focus on Native Americans in an urban setting. Griswold is a New Mexico journalist covering issues for southwest Indigenous people. He, himself, is a member of Laguna Pueblo, while also holding family ties to Jemez and Zuni Pueblos. He’s worked as a content producer KUSA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Denver, and on the assignments desk at KOB-TV, part of the Hubbard Broadcasting chain. He attended the University of New Mexico.

Lucia Starbuck

Lucia Starbuck reports for KUNR Public Radio, where she focuses on community reporting and the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic in Reno, Nevada. Starbuck knows the area well. She is from Reno and graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, along with a minor in cinema and media studies. Local community issues are her passion, including the affordable housing crisis, access to oral healthcare and the challenges voters with disabilities face while participating in the election process. Along with radio, Starbuck reports in various formats, including digital storytelling and live reporting on social media. She has also directed and filmed two documentaries about homelessness. Starbuck contributed to KUNR’s coverage of hateful expressions at the University of Nevada, Reno, produced in 2019, which won a regional Edward R. Murrow award in the Best Continuing Coverage category and first place in the Associated Press Television and Radio Association (APTRA) broadcast contest for Continuing Coverage. Starbuck co-created and contributed to the series Spurs & Mud: A Century of Rodeo, which won first place from APTRA in 2019 for Best Sports Coverage.

Riane Roldan

Roldan reports for KUT in Austin, Texas and concentrates on the costs and benefits of suburban growth in Hays County. Roldan covered politics, immigration, and the environment during internships at The Texas Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman. She graduates from Emerson College in May with a bachelor's degree in journalism and grew up in Miami, Florida, where she attended Miami Dade College. Roldan has covered criminal justice for The Medill Justice Project and attended The New York Times Student Journalism Institute. Born to Cuban and Chilean families, she speaks Spanish and is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Roldan is also an alumnus of the Chips Quinn Scholars Program for Diversity in Journalism and won the first place award for in-depth reporting from the Florida College Press Association Miami.