PublicSource

PublicSource is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, digital-first media organization dedicated to serving Pittsburgh and the surrounding region with public-service reporting and news analysis. Its mission is to inspire critical thinking and bold ideas through local journalism rooted in facts, diverse voices and the pursuit of transparency. PublicSource currently covers K-12 education, local government, economic development, the environment, health and public safety.

Rita Oceguera

Rita Oceguera covers communities that ring Chicago, including Aurora, Cicero, Elgin, Joliet and Waukegan, for Injustice Watch. She earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Northwestern University, where she studied social justice and investigative reporting and focused on a range of Latino issues. During her internship at The Bubble in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Oceguera dove deep into the inequalities that women face as soccer players and sharpened her skills as a video editor. She then worked with The Chicago Reporter to examine the spread of business vacancies in Chicago and analyzed a prosperous Latino neighborhood. Her partnership with The Chicago Reporter led her into an investigation of the complexities that low income students face when applying to colleges. Originally from Aurora, Oceguera now lives in Chicago with her fiancé, her pet axolotl (a.k.a. a Mexican walking fish) and an abundance of plants.

Abbey Marshall

Abbey Marshall reports for The Devil Strip, a community-owned, independent news outlet in Akron, Ohio, where she focuses on how economic trends affect ordinary citizens. Marshall is a 2020 graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, where she studied on a full academic scholarship awarded to a student pursuing a career in reporting. Throughout her collegiate career, she completed two internships at The Columbus Dispatch as a metro reporter and web producer. She recently returned from Washington, D.C., where she covered breaking news as an intern at Politico. Having worked at a nonprofit in Mumbai, studied French and media in Aix-en-Provence and covered politics in the nation’s capital, she ultimately realized she missed the state she calls home and the fight for solid local journalism.

Ellen Wagner

Ellen Wagner reports on municipal services and budget cuts for Mahoning Matters, a new collaboration between Google and McClatchy news based in Youngstown, Ohio. Wagner knows Ohio. She covered health, local events, and crime as a metro intern at The Columbus Dispatch last summer. She was the editor-in-chief of The Post, an independent student newspaper at Ohio University and in the college town of Athens in the southern part of the state. Wagner also covered crime, courts and police in Athens during her four years at The Post. She graduated from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in the spring with a major in journalism news and information and a certificate in Italian studies. She is from Westlake, a suburb outside of Cleveland. Wagner, along with the other executive editors of The Post, won Society of Professional Journalists’ 2019 Mark of Excellence Award for editorial writing.

Bennett Leckrone

Bennett Leckrone is a reporter for Maryland Matters, a news nonprofit based in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Leckrone will concentrate on state elections, money, and ethics. He is a recent graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, and recently completed an internship at The Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, D.C.. Prior to graduating, he wrote about state and local governments during internships at The Columbus Dispatch, Dayton Daily News, PennLive.com and his hometown paper in Ohio, The Troy Daily News. Leckrone got his start covering city council meetings for the independent, student-run newspaper at Ohio University, The Post, and eventually became the paper’s long-form editor. Leckrone is a lifelong Ohio resident and has written extensively about Appalachian issues and the opioid epidemic.

Clara Hendrickson

Clara Hendrickson does PolitiFact fact checking at the Detroit Free Press, where she holds public officials across the state to account on a range of issues. Prior to her time in Michigan, Hendrickson was a researcher at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. and a freelance reporter for national and local outlets. At Brookings, she wrote on a range of public policy issues, including rising regional inequality, domestic and international efforts to regulate “Big Tech” and the financial challenges confronting local newsrooms. Her journalism has appeared in Boston Review, Democracy Journal, The Atlantic and Politico Magazine. She has also contributed feature articles for the non-profit outlet DCist, such as the impact on service workers of eliminating late-night public transportation routes and efforts to provide residents affordable exercise options in neighborhoods that don’t have a gym. Hendrickson holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Pennsylvania where she was an op-ed columnist for The Daily Pennsylvanian, frequently covering labor and income disparity issues on campus and in Philadelphia.

Camille Fassett

Camille Fassett is a data reporter for The Associated Press based in the San Francisco Bay area. Most recently, she was a data science fellow at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, where she applied statistical analysis and machine learning to public interest data. Previously, Fassett was a reporter and researcher at Freedom of the Press Foundation, where she covered surveillance, whistleblowers and transparency issues, and co-ran the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, a data project tracking press freedom violations. Fassett also covered the attacks on press freedom in Malta. She is also a member of the data and security collective Lucy Parsons Labs and a board member of the data archival group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOS). She graduated from the University of California/Berkeley.

The Spokesman-Review

The Spokesman-Review is a family-owned, daily newspaper in Spokane, the second-largest city in Washington state and the largest northern city between Minneapolis and Seattle. For the past 135 years, the newspaper has served readers across eastern Washington, the northern Idaho Panhandle and north to the Canadian border. Its focus is local and regional stories, including community news, government issues, health, business, entertainment, sports and the outdoors. In addition to a partnership with KHQ, a sister television station in Spokane, The Spokesman-Review also has a unique cooperative agreement with newspapers across the area, including the Seattle Times and The Idaho Statesman, to share stories. This arrangement helps provide robust daily reports and greatly benefits all readers across the Pacific Northwest.

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.

Twin Cities Public Television

Founded in 1957, Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) is a community-licensed, multi-platform, public service media organization that serves 2.3+ million people each month across its five broadcast channels, four digital platforms, in-person engagement, and national programming. TPT’s mission is to enrich lives and strengthen communities through the power of media.