Utah

Lexi Peery

Lexi Peery is a reporter for KUER/NPR Utah where she focuses on issues about fast-growing Washington County. Peery is a Salt Lake City native who has been in Southern Utah the past year reporting on all things related to the environment, development and government for The Spectrum & Daily News. She returned to Utah after graduating from Boston University, majoring in journalism and concentrating in environmental studies while earning the Blue Chip Award. During her senior year she was an environmental and newsroom fellow at WBUR, Boston’s NPR station. That same year she also interned for the national call-in show, “On Point.” While at BU, she worked her way up to editor-in-chief of the independent student newspaper, The Daily Free Press. She also was a correspondent at The Boston Globe and did freelance reporting for City Journals in the Salt Lake Valley.

Sophia Eppolito

Sophia Eppolito covers the Utah Legislature for The Associated Press where she concentrates on the intersection of religion and state government. As a news associate for The AP in New York City, she wrote about crime and community news on the East Coast. Previously, she worked at The Boston Globe for two years covering general assignment stories and breaking news. She also worked as a Massachusetts Statehouse Correspondent for the Lowell Sun where she reported on the rollout of recreational marijuana and climate change. A Los Angeles native, she attended Boston University where she received the Blue Chip Award, the highest student honor conferred by the BU College of Communication.

Joan Meiners

Joan Meiners reports for The Spectrum in St. George, Utah, and focuses on the consequences of growth in Cedar City. Meiners has a Ph.D. in Ecology from the University of Florida, where she published multiple peer-reviewed scientific articles. As a journalist, she has written about the environment for Smithsonian Magazine, Discover Magazine, Orion Magazine and New Scientist Magazine. She spent 2019 as a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network investigating pollution from the oil and gas industry in southeast Louisiana for the ‘Polluter’s Paradise’ series, which won the Bayou Brief award for Louisiana’s Best Environment Reporting of 2019. The previous year, she got her start doing newspaper writing as an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) fellow at The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Before that, she produced data journalism for the award-winning series, ‘Peak Florida’ while still a graduate student.

K. Sophie Will

K. Sophie Will reports for The Spectrum in St. George, Utah, where she focuses on the major national parks in the area—Bryce Canyon, Zion, and the Grand Canyon—and the consequences of growth and tourism. Being in Utah marks a return for Will, who grew up in Draper, Utah. She is an investigative data journalist who has covered everything from local government to major human rights violations at investigative multimedia internships with NBC 10 Boston, HuffPost, the New England Center for Investigative Reporting/WGBH and The Deseret News. She has also covered daily metro news at the Boston Globe as well as climate change and women’s rights at the Thomson Reuters Foundation in London. At Boston University, where she graduated with her bachelor’s in journalism in May 2020, she was the managing editor and the pioneering in-depth and data editor at the BU News Service.

The Spectrum

The Spectrum is a digital and daily print newsroom based in southwestern Utah and is the lone remaining daily print publication between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. We are a general news organization, with an emphasis on watchdog, government and environmental issues. We cover all of Washington County’s 17 municipalities and unincorporated areas, along with smaller communities and public lands spanning 25,000 square miles across parts of Utah, Arizona and Nevada.  

KUER / NPR Utah

KUER is Utah’s largest NPR affiliate, reaching 165,000 listeners each week from St. George to Pocatello, Idaho. KUER/NPR Utah, licensed through the University of Utah, employs 28 full-time staff including a news director, politics/government editor, a web producer, five reporters, a news/production assistant and two hosts. The mission of KUER News is to provide reporting in the public interest with a developing bent toward investigative, watchdog journalism. KUER produces newscasts during Morning Edition and All Things Considered with midday newscast at noon.  

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.

The Spectrum

The Spectrum is a digital and daily print newsroom based in southwestern Utah and is the lone remaining daily print publication between Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. We are a general news organization, with an emphasis on watchdog, government and environmental issues. We cover all of Washington County’s 17 municipalities and unincorporated areas, along with smaller communities and public lands spanning 25,000 square miles across parts of Utah, Arizona and Nevada.  

Zachary Podmore

Zak is a journalist and film producer who has covered rural Utah politics, public lands and conservation issues for Outside Online, Sierra, Four Corners Free Press, Canoe & Kayak and the Huffington Post. In early 2019, he revived a local newspaper in southeast Utah, the Canyon Echo, which he edits. His writing has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Colorado chapter and Folio magazine. Zak has worked as a river ranger in Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. He has an M.F.A. in environmental nonfiction writing, and has written a book, “Confluence: Navigating the Personal and Political On Rivers of the New West.” Zak has lived in Utah’s San Juan County since 2015.

Kate Groetzinger

Kate has been an intern, fellow and reporter at Texas Monthly, Texas Observer, Quartz, the Texas Standard, and Voces, an oral history project. More recently, at the Observer, she covered the Texas state legislature. She received her B.A. from Brown University, where she majored in English and wrote for the Brown Daily Herald, and M.A. from the University of Texas Moody School of Journalism, where she also worked as an audio storytelling teaching assistant.