DATA

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.

The 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.

The Kansas City Star

The Kansas City Star is the largest media organization covering the Kansas City region, which encompasses Kansas and Missouri. We cover both statehouses. The Star was founded in 1880 as "a paper for the people," a mission that continues today. We strive to tell stories that affect the lives of Kansas Citians and beyond.  

Akron Beacon Journal

The Akron Beacon Journal provides comprehensive news coverage primarily for Summit and Stark counties in post-industrial Northeast Ohio. We frequently publish deep-dive enterprise reports on a wide variety of topics. These newsroom also leads the joint news efforts of GateHouse Media in Northeast Ohio, which includes numerous other daily media sites and weekly publications. Overall, GateHouse serves 10 counties in Northeast Ohio and a population of 1.2 million residents. We also work closely with GateHouse’s Columbus Dispatch for Statehouse and regional news coverage.

Lauren Lindstrom

Lauren has been a reporter at The Blade in Toledo for nearly five years, most recently on the health beat covering everything from Ohio’s heroin and opioid epidemic to Toledo’s efforts to reduce childhood lead poisoning. Her work has won several state and local awards for investigation and breaking news, including the Press Club of Toledo’s 2017 Touchstone Award for a series examining the lack of local oversight on homes with unsafe lead levels. Originally from Wisconsin, she interned at the Green Bay Press Gazette and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Lauren majored in journalism with a minor in Spanish at Northwestern University, where she was news editor for North by Northwestern, an independent student magazine.