MULTIMEDIA

Jesse Vad

Jesse Vad covers eastern Santa Cruz County for Nogales International, a local publication in southern Arizona. Previously, Vad worked as a reporting intern for SJV Water, a nonprofit online publication focused on water coverage in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where he covered all things water including agriculture, climate change and policy. Vad is a graduate of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism’s class of 2020 where he specialized in visual journalism. He and his peers were finalists in the EPPY Awards for their pandemic coverage in the South Bronx. Vad has also worked as a remote reporting intern for The Jakarta Post where he covered Covid-19’s impact abroad. He was awarded the 2020 Correspondents Fund Scholar title from the J-School for his work with The Jakarta Post. As a freelancer, Vad’s work has appeared in NBC News, Gothamist, The Times-Standard and more. Before coming to journalism, Vad was an elementary school teacher. Over summer breaks, he worked on his own storytelling projects in New Orleans, Tajikistan and China.

Emma Davis

Emma Davis covers health, education, local government and public policy in north central Ohio for Richland Source, a news site based in Mansfield, Ohio. A multimedia journalist, Davis has interned twice with PBS’ Frontline and was a staff writer for the Capital News Service. Davis earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and leadership studies from the University of Richmond in 2021, where she was managing editor of The Collegian. During Davis’ tenure, she and her colleagues received several Associated Collegiate Press awards, including top honors for their website and for best news/feature presentation for a series about memorialization on Richmond’s campus. The series was part of her work as a fellow for the Poynter Institute’s College Media Project, in which Davis investigated a burial ground of enslaved people on her university’s campus. Davis’ work has also been published by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism and the Henrico Citizen. She grew up in Sayville, New York.

Aaliyah Bowden

Aaliyah Bowden covers healthcare for The Charlotte Post, which reports on the African American community in Charlotte, North Carolina. Bowden interned at North Carolina Health News, a nonprofit news organization, during the peak of the pandemic, reporting on health issues across the state. Her story on food handlers and farmers testing positive for the coronavirus was republished in The Siasat Daily in Hyderabad, India. Bowden won an award for her story on North Carolina's historically Black colleges and universities keeping COVID-19 cases low during the fall 2020 semester. As a student at North Carolina Central University, she was the co-editor of the Campus Echo, reporting breaking news and feature stories, and scoring interviews with fashion designer Dapper Dan and singer and actress Keke Palmer. Bowden, from Jacksonville, North Carolina, aspires to start a health magazine solely devoted to covering the health of Black women.

Jackson Stephens

Jackson Stephens is a multimedia journalist focusing on poverty for the Pacific Daily News in Hagatna, Guam. As a freelance reporter, he covered immigration, incarceration, international policy, protests and religion. His work has appeared in Capital & Main, the Religion News Service, the Pacific Council on International Policy, and Voice of America. Stephens, of Castro Valley, California, holds a master's degree in journalism from the USC Annenberg School. There he was an editor on the global city desk at Annenberg Media, USC's student-run newsroom. Stephens earned a bachelor's degree in international relations from the University of the Pacific, and studied abroad his junior year—one semester in Iringa, Tanzania and another in Santiago, Chile. He is fluent in Spanish and speaks basic Swahili.

Jesse Bedayn

Jesse Bedayn reports on economic inequality for The Mercury News in San Jose, California. Before becoming a Report for America corps member, Bedayn studied investigative reporting and narrative writing at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, where he wrote about health care and aging in California and investigated the fraught world of for-profit nursing homes for the Investigative Reporting Program. Bedayn has worked as a stringer for The New York Times and as a research and data assistant at KQED public radio, he plumbed through police use-of-force cases for The California Reporting Project. Bedayn holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Kent in England. As editor of the student paper InQuire, he won local awards and shared the paper's first national U.K. award since the paper's inception in 1965. Bedayn grew up in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada, and spends his free time rambling in the mountains.

AL.com

AL.com is the largest digital news site in Alabama, and one of the nation’s largest local news sites. It is part of the Alabama Media Group, which also operates social brand “It’s a Southern Thing,” “This is Alabama,” “People of Alabama” and the millennial-focused news brand “Reckon.” Alabama Media Group is part of Advance Local. Content for AL.com comes from three Advance Local newspapers: The Mobile Press Register, Birmingham News, Huntsville Times. The staff includes 75 reporters, editors, social producers and videographers.

Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting

The Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting is an independent, nonpartisan and collaborative nonprofit newsroom dedicated to statewide, data-driven investigative reporting. AZCIR’s mission is to produce, foster and promote investigative journalism through original and collaborative reporting, often using data, and by training the next generation of investigative journalists.

Granite State News Collaborative

The Granite State News Collaborative is a collective of nearly 20 local media, education and community partners working together to produce and share news stories on the issues that most impact New Hampshire. The idea is that together we can provide more information to more communities than we could individually. The Collaborative was founded in 2018 by a small group of journalists who assessed the state of the journalism ecosystem and thought they could do better if they worked together. The Collaborative has tackled tough topics including the opioid and mental health crises, winning several NH Press Association and New England Newspaper & Press Association Awards for its work.

The Charlotte Post

The Charlotte Post Publishing Company is been the mirror to the African-American community in North Carolina's two largest media markets. The company's roots are in the AME Zion Church, where The Messenger was launched in 1878 to provide a faith-based forum for newly emancipated Black people during the Reconstruction period. It is the leading source of news and information in Charlotte's Black community, which makes up about one-third of Mecklenburg County's 1.1 million population. Its sister publication, The Triangle Tribune, was founded in 1998 and is similarly situation in the Raleigh-Durham market, which exceeds 1 million people. The 16-member staff consists of three full-time journalists and three freelance photographers and journalists.

The Washington Informer

The Washington Informer Newspaper Co. Inc. is a multimedia, award-winning organization founded in 1964 in order to highlight positive images of African Americans. Its motto is EDUCATE, EMPOWER, and INFORM. The paper serves metropolitan Washington D.C. through its weekly print edition and weekly email newsletter and via its website.