Texas

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.

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.

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.

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.

Allyson Ortegon

Allyson Ortegon is working for KUT in Austin, Texas where she covers growth and development in nearby Hays County. Before that, she covered politics and policy, including the 86th Texas Legislature, during fellowships with The Texas Tribune and with Texas NPR affiliate stations. She wrote for The Alcalde, the award-winning alumni magazine published by The University of Texas at Austin since 1913. In an earlier stint at KUT, Austin’s NPR Station, she participated in  NPR's Next Generation Radio project. At UT, she reported across radio, television and print media for student publications including The Daily Texan and Texas Student Television. She will graduate with a degree in journalism and a secondary concentration in business. She is a two-time recipient of awards from The Headliner’s Foundation of Texas and she received the Jo Caldwell Meyer Scholarship from the Women Communicators of Austin, the Bob Schenkkan Endowed Presidential Scholarship, and the Carmage and Martha Ann Walls Foundation Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Journalism.

Haley Samsel

Haley Samsel covers the consequences of economic growth for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She has covered everything from cybersecurity to home medical equipment as an associate editor for HME Business, Mobility Management and Security Today magazines in Dallas. Before graduating from American University in 2019, she reported on Capitol Hill for The Texas Tribune and interned for NPR’s education desk, USA Today College, The Investigative Reporting Workshop and The Washington Monthly. She served as editor-in-chief of The Eagle, the university’s student newspaper, where she worked with students to publish innovative digital projects and accountability reporting. More recently, Haley contributed articles on youth issues to YR Media. She grew up in the Dallas suburb of Plano.

Alejandra Martinez

Alejandra Martinez reports for KERA in Dallas as well as The Texas Newsroom, a journalism collaboration among the public radio stations of Texas and NPR, where she covers the impact of Covid-19 and its associated economic fallout on marginalized communities. Before joining Report for America, Martinez was a producer at WLRN, South Florida's NPR station where she covered immigration, marginalized communities, and the local arts scene. She would book, write, and produce stories for and the station’s daily talk show, “Sundial,” and she was part of Public Radio International’s (PRI) “Every 30 Seconds” election project, a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond. A native Texan, Martinez began her broadcast career working with KUT, Austin’s NPR station, first as an intern and later a producer. In Texas, Martinez participated in NPR’s Next-Generation Radio project, a week-long journalism boot camp, where she covered Houston’s recovery post-Hurricane Harvey in 2018. She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism in 2017.  

Sara Ernst

Sara Willa Ernst reports for KERA and The Texas Newsroom, a journalism collaboration among the public radio stations of Texas and NPR, where she covers health disparities related to factors including income that affect Houston communities. Ernst was a Reporting Fellow at New Hampshire Public Radio, working both in daily news and long-form podcasting. During her time there, she was a producer for the podcasts The Second Greatest Show On Earth and Outside/In. She co-reported a two-part podcast on sex education in New Hampshire, covering topics from the statewide curriculum, abstinence-based education, LGBTQ inclusivity, consent and more. Before working on the podcast team, she was a General Assignment Reporter in the NHPR newsroom, covering the charter school debate embroiling the Granite State and the 2020 New Hampshire Presidential Primary. After graduating from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Ernst interned for NPR in Washington D.C. She previously held internships at Nashville Public Radio and WBUR Boston. She was a Chips Quinn Scholar in 2018 and is a member of the Asian American Journalists Association.

Mark Rosenberg

Mark Rosenberg reports for The Victoria Advocate, the second oldest paper in Texas, where he reports on the rural counties surrounding the small city on the coastal plains. Rosenberg reported on criminal justice as an intern at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he contributed to Accused, the Enquirer ’s true-crime podcast. Previously, he worked as a breaking news intern at the Toledo Blade, reporting on public policy and rural politics. He earned his B.A. from Yale University, where he served as editor-in-chief of The New Journal, a magazine that publishes narrative and investigative reporting. He is from Lexington, Massachusetts.