Texas

Obed Manuel

Until recently, Obed he was an associate editor at Central Track in Dallas, where he was focused on city news/politics and social change movements. He previously worked as managing editor of Latina Lista, where he launched a weekly podcast and wrote on immigration and technology. A graduate of the Mayborn School of Journalism at University of North Texas, Manuel was a staff writer for the North Texas Daily and a two-time intern at the Dallas Observer. In 2015, Manuel assisted former Dallas Observer editor Joe Tone with research for “Bones,” a book about money laundering through the quarter horse racing industry. A native of the northern Mexican city of Monterrey, Manuel reports on the growing population of second-generation Hispanic immigrants and the issues they face.

Mallory Falk

Mallory is a two-time Edward R. Murrow Regional Award-winner, a 2016 USC Annenberg National Health Reporting Fellow, and a radio journalist whose stories have aired on All Things Considered, Here & Now, and Texas Standard. She was an education reporter for New Orleans’ NPR-affiliate WWNO and a producer of What My Students Taught Me, an education podcast from The Atlantic and Columbia Journalism School’s Teacher Project. Earlier she served as communications director for Kids Rethink New Orleans Schools. Originally from Pittsburgh, Falk is a graduate of Middlebury College and the Transom Story Workshop.In her first year with Report for America, Mallory was a multimedia reporter for KRWG in New Mexico, covering education, healthcare, economic development and sustainability. In her second year, she will join Texas News Hub, based at KERA, to cover the borderlands and El Paso.

Ciara McCarthy

Ciara McCarthy has worked as an intern for the Marshall Project and a researcher at the Guardian U.S., where she contributed to “The Counted,” an Emmy-nominated project on police killings. She later worked as a staff community reporter for Patch, covering neighborhoods in Manhattan. In college, she was the editor-in-chief of the Daily Northwestern, the respected student-run daily of Northwestern University. In her first year as an RFA corps member, McCarthy covered local government for the Victoria Advocate. In her second year, she will focus on rural public health. Covering rural public health In her first year, Ciara covered City Hall for the Victoria Advocate, the second-oldest newspaper in Texas, a 172 year old, family-owned daily newspaper serving the rural communities in and around Victoria near the Gulf of Mexico. During this time, she also helped her newsroom maintain continuing coverage of Hurricane Harvey recovery efforts in rural communities overshadowed by Houston flooding and calamities elsewhere. In her second year, Ciara shifted her coverage gap and focuses on rural public health issues in Victoria County and the Crossroads region, focusing on how local petrochemical plants impact residents’ health, along with other issues specific to the state of rural health in the area.

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.

The Victoria Advocate

Established in 1846 – the same year the Republic of Texas joined the Union – the Victoria Advocate has a rich tradition of local ownership and stewardship of its community. It was named the Newspaper of the Year in 2014 by the Local Media Association.  

The Dallas Morning News

This beat focuses on coverage of southern Dallas, with a special emphasis on building trust with the African-American community and reflecting community life, diverse voices and neighborhood milestones and events on our website, in our social channels and in our pages. We envision that the most urgent issues to cover here include income inequality, housing and jobs. The reporter would work closely with and be mentored by our reporters covering Dallas city hall and Dallas County, as well as our business reporters.

Acacia Coronado

Acacia Coronado covers the Texas Legislature and the politics of climate change for The Associated Press. She is a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin. Her passion for storytelling led her to a bachelor of journalism degree. Most recently, she covered immigration and human rights as a fellow at The Texas Observer. She also did two semesters at The Texas Tribune as an investigative fellow, covering immigration, the Texas Legislature and criminal justice, and a summer in New York at The Wall Street Journal as a reporting intern with the U.S. News East Coast Bureau. She first fell in love with journalism as a Life and Arts reporter with The Daily Texan, the student newspaper, in 2016. She loves returning to her small-town roots and living her Catholic faith to the fullest.

Brooklynn Cooper

Brooklynn Cooper covers South Dallas for the Dallas Morning News with an emphasis on income inequality, housing, and jobs in this predominantly African-American neighborhood. During her senior year at the University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill Cooper, who is fluent in Spanish, wrote on Hispanic/Latino affairs for both The Charlotte Observer as a reporting intern and at Our Chatham, a project to fill news gaps in N.C.’s Chatham County. For the Observer she covered Charlotte, N.C.’s immigration court and, as an intern at The Independent Journal Review, a policy journal in Washington, D.C., she also covered immigration. After spending three years at The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s independent student newspaper. Cooper spent her last spring covering Venezuelan migration in Medellín, Colombia. Cooper is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists. She volunteers with Latino youth in Durham, N.C.

Keren Carrión

Keren Carrión reports for KERA in Dallas as well as The Texas Newsroom, a journalism collaboration among the public radio stations of Texas and NPR. A visual bilingual journalist, originally from Puerto Rico, she’ll bring her intelligence and camera to her work covering communities around Dallas. Carrión graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. with a Bachelor’s in fine arts and spent four years gaining reporting experience in the nation’s Capital. Carrión recently worked with CNN as a video editor in Atlanta, Georgia, where she edited and produced videos for on-air and the network’s digital platforms. She has previously interned with CNN, the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, USA Today, Univision, and The Hill. Carrión is an alumnus of the 2019 New York Portfolio Review, the Eddie Adams Workshop XXXI, and the 2019 Momenta Photo Workshop Project Puerto Rico.

Kailey Broussard

Kailey Broussard is an accountability reporter covering Arlington, Texas for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. With a population of almost 400,000 people, Arlington is among the nation’s largest cities with no daily professional news presence. While pursuing her journalism degree at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, she reported on Arizona’s congressional delegation in Washington D.C., pedestrian fatalities in the Sun Belt, and Venezuelan refugees in Peru as well as U.S. disaster response through a 2019 Carnegie-Knight News21 reporting fellowship. She holds an MMC from Arizona State University and a B.A. from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Originally from Louisiana, Broussard spent two years interning and freelancing for The Advocate in Baton Rouge and four years as a staff writer and editor for her student paper, The Vermilion. Her work has won recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists regions 11 and 12, Southeast Journalism Conference, Arizona Press Club, and Broadcast Education Association.