Dallas Free Press

Dallas Free Press, a nonprofit news site, launched in January 2020 to amplify voices in disinvested communities and explore solutions to our city’s systemic inequities. Its community-powered journalism focuses on three zip codes in South Dallas and West Dallas, which are predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods.

El Tecolote

El Tecolote began as a journalism project in a Raza Studies class at San Francisco State University’s newly created College of Ethnic Studies in 1970. Five decades later, El Tecolote continues to be free, circulating 10,000 copies biweekly. It is the longest running bilingual (English/Spanish) newspaper in the American Southwest. Our mission is to promote cultural arts, community media and civic engagement as a way of building healthy and empowered Latino communities. El Tecolote has a longstanding commitment to inform immigrants, which has proven crucial during a time of increasingly anti-immigrant sentiment.

El Tímpano

El Tímpano—Spanish for “eardrum”—informs, engages and amplifies the voices of Latino and Mayan immigrants of Oakland and the wider Bay Area. Through innovative approaches to local journalism and civic engagement, El Tímpano surfaces community members’ stories and questions on local and national issues, provides news and information relevant to their needs, and investigates the concerns they bring to our attention.

Grant Ritchey

Grant Ritchey covers education and the growing workforce for Knox Pages, a digital news organization serving residents of Knox County, in central Ohio. Prior to joining Knox Pages, Ritchey was a general assignment reporter for the Ashland Times-Gazette based in Ashland, Ohio, for which he reported and wrote features on sex trafficking, catalytic converter thefts, county and local government, crime, courts, new businesses, and on important and overlooked members of the community. While enrolled at Ohio University, Ritchey worked at the student-run news publication, The Post. There, he gained experience in meeting coverage, breaking news, investigative reporting, and feature writing. Ritchey interned at The Borgen Project, a nonprofit that addresses global poverty, where he wrote reports on internet access, clean drinking water and the steps being taken toward solving those issues.

Michael Grant

Michael Grant is a photojournalist at Black Voice News, a news site and weekly paper in Riverside, California, and focuses on issues related to the climate and environmental justice. As a freelance photographer, Grant has traveled and lived in a number of places, including Brooklyn, New York, Atlanta, Miami and Ethiopia, investigating and documenting the aesthetics of blackness, class, family, relationships and cultural diversities. His work has been exhibited at the Parsons School of Design and Photoville in New York City, and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Grant holds a bachelor’s degree in criminology from Hampton University.

Michael Indriolo

Michael Indriolo is a multimedia journalist at Flint Beat, a digital publication in Flint, Michigan. Before this, Indriolo worked at The Land, a Cleveland-based nonprofit newsroom, spearheading coverage of Cleveland’s historic 2021 mayoral election and health equity. He began his career at The Portager, which serves Portage County, Ohio, investigating how calls for racial equity in the wake of George Floyd’s murder clashed with the status quo in rural northeast Ohio. Indriolo says that growing up the son of a Lebanese refugee and a parent born in a small town in America left him ethnically ambiguous while offering him unique insights into what being an American means, and if it weren’t for violence ripping through Lebanon in the ‘70s, most of his family wouldn’t be in America. That’s what he seeks to understand through journalism: how violence intersects with communities’ and individuals’ pursuits of the American dream.

Ximena Natera

Ximena Natera is a photojournalist at Berkeleyside, a nonprofit digital news site that covers Berkeley and the East Bay in California. Originally from Mexico City, Natera is a founding member of Pie de Pagina, an award-winning investigative newsroom in Mexico that specializes in reporting on migration, human rights and justice. She studied documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York City, and her work largely focuses on complex issues told through individual stories of people who are often pushed into extraordinary circumstances. Photography has taken her to places and spaces that would have been unimaginable under any other circumstances—it has been the privilege of her life. Natera is a member of Periodistas de a Pie, Women Photograph, Native Agency and the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Aryana Noroozi

Aryana Noroozi is a photojournalist covering disparities in health and education, police violence, social justice and civil rights battles affecting Black Californians for Black Voice News, which gives a voice to the community by using data and solutions-oriented reporting. Prior to joining Black Voice News, Noroozi was a Migration Fellow at The GroundTruth Project and a Crisis Reporting Fellow at the Pulitzer Center. Noroozi holds a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and she has been documenting addiction’s impact on a family in rural Illinois and plans to expand this to a long-form body of work around addiction and resilience.

Chase Cofield

Chase Cofield covers the rural communities surrounding Victoria, Texas as staff photographer for the Victoria Advocate. Before joining Report for America, Cofield worked on the photo desk at The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s independent student newspaper, covering a variety of stories ranging from sports to local communities. Cofield also was a staff photographer for Coulture Magazine, a student-run fashion magazine. He shadowed photographers on assignments for Indy Week and was a 2021 summer fellow for Education NC, where he documented and photographed summer school programs in North Carolina. Cofield enjoys DJing and music production. He was a DJ for his campus radio station, WXYC 89.3, and co-coordinated one of their specialty shows, New Science Experience.

Harika Maddala

Harika Maddala is a photojournalist based in Stockton, California, covering the news around San Joaquin County for the Bay City News Foundation and its nonprofit news site Local News Matters. Maddala previously documented the homelessness crisis as a research fellow at the Starling Lab for Data Integrity, which was co-founded by Stanford University and the University of Southern California. Born and raised in India, Maddala is fluent in Telugu, Hindi and Kannada, and moved to the U.S. at age 19. As a staff photographer and photo editor for San Francisco State’s newspaper, the Golden Gate Xpress, Maddala covered police violence, prison transfers and environmental racism, and placed in the top 10 in the Hearst Journalism Awards 2021. Maddala’s work has been displayed at galleries.