West

Brandon Block

Brandon Block reports for The Olympian in Olympia, Washington, focusing on homelessness in and around the state capital and the factors that contribute to homelessness, such as mental illness and drug addiction. Block is a reporter and filmmaker who, for two years, has covered criminal justice, immigration and the environment in Baltimore. His writing has appeared in WYPR 88.1, the DCist, and the Baltimore Beat, and he fact-checked the book “I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad.” He spent the last year in Bangkok, Thailand, where he worked for an education nonprofit on a Princeton in Asia fellowship. He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Film & Media Studies from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Block got his start in journalism by writing film and theater criticism for Baltimore City Paper.

Annie Berman

Annie Berman covers health care for the Anchorage Daily News. A veteran of AmeriCorps and Vista volunteer programs, Berman is a multimedia journalist who has covered breaking news, crime, culture and politics for Mission Local and KQED, both in San Francisco. She has also helped produce “The Science of Happiness,” an award-winning podcast by PRX, Her work has been published in The New York Times, KQED and The Indian Express, an English-language daily published in Mumbai. She holds a B.A. from Smith College and is graduating from the University of California’s Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in May.

Nada Samir Atieh

Nada Atieh is a reporter for the Redding Searchlight in Redding, California, which covers areas north of Sacramento. She focuses on education, childhood trauma and the achievement gap. An Arab-American journalist from Dallas, Texas, Atieh has been working as a journalist in the Middle East since 2017. She has reported on the military escalation in northwest Syria and the humanitarian crisis created by the Syrian civil war within Syria. Previously, she trained with Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), where she coordinated the awards distribution at the 2018 annual conference. She has reported about the economic climate in Jordan for Venture magazine. Atieh has also covered the Jordanian government’s initiative to bring employment services to refugee camps, the impact of tax hikes on food producers in Jordan, and the growth of air connectivity throughout the Middle East. She is fluent in conversational Arabic and proficient in Modern Standard Arabic. She holds a B.A. from the University of Texas at Arlington, where she studied broadcast journalism and communications.

Mara Abbott

Mara is an Olympic-athlete-turned-journalist. As a freelance journalist in Colorado, she has been published in The Wall Street Journal, espnW, The Colorado Independent, Runner’s World, and Westword. For her hometown paper, Boulder’s Daily Camera, she reported on everything from agricultural policy to the influence of local political advocacy groups. She has won multiple Colorado Associated Press Awards. Before her career in journalism, she was a professional cyclist — the two-time U.S. National Champion, winner of women’s Giro d’Italia and a member of the 2016 U.S. Olympic Team where she placed fourth.

Christopher Aadland

Christopher Aadland covers Native American issues, Covid-19 fallout and the Montana Legislature for the Montana Free Press, an investigative news outlet in Helena, Montana. Aadland spent his first year as a Report for America corps member in Wyoming reporting on the Wind River Reservation for the Casper Star-Tribune. Chris and a colleague won a Wyoming Press Association Pacemaker award for a story they did revealing a dark money lobbying effort by one of the state’s tribes. Chris has also worked at the Wisconsin State Journal, where he covered public safety, city government, breaking news and other subjects. As a student at the University of Minnesota, he was the managing editor of the award-winning, student-run Minnesota Daily and a student reporter for the Twin Cities newspaper, the StarTribune. Chris, whose father is an enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, started learning the Ojibwe language while at the University of Minnesota and developed a desire to contribute to better, more nuanced coverage of Indian Country as a journalist.