The Mercury News
The Mercury News is the leading source of breaking news, local news, sports, business, entertainment, lifestyle and opinion for Silicon Valley, the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond.
WRITING
The Modesto Bee
The Modesto Bee, a McClatchy news organization, serves primarily the city of Modesto, Stanislaus County, and its surrounding cities and counties in the heart of California’s Central Valley and the Sierra foothills. The Bee has a rich, 134-year history of serving a diverse community built on agriculture with an eye on diversifying employment sectors in hopes of fending off the “brain drain” that sees many of our youngest and brightest leave for college and never return. Our mission is to connect with readers each day to discover and report on the issues that touch their lives.
The Sacramento Bee
The Sacramento Bee is the only daily newspaper covering California’s capital city. At 161 years old, the news organization is McClatchy’s flagship. The newspaper’s coverage area extends along the I-80 corridor from Lake Tahoe to the East and up to but not necessarily including the Bay Area. The newspaper covers northern California regularly as well as Stockton. In Sacramento, readers expect The Sacramento Bee to hold elected officials at the statehouse to account, and they rely on the newspaper for deep environmental coverage in addition to local government and growth.
Amelia Ferrell Knisely
Amelia covers poverty in southern West Virginia for the Mountain State Spotlight. Previously she covered education and children’s issues for The Tennessean in Nashville. She has written extensively about homelessness and poverty, and she previously served as editor of The Contributor, a nonprofit newspaper sold by people experiencing homelessness. Her writing on the plight of migrant tomato farmers was nominated for an international news award. Originally from West Virginia, Amelia started her journalism career as a television reporter in her hometown. She holds a B.A. from Shepherd University in West Virginia and a master’s degree from Marshall University.
Becky Dernbach
Becky Z. Dernbach reports for Sahan Journal, a news organization in Minnesota’s capital, St. Paul, that focuses on the state’s immigrants. Dernbach focuses her reporting on the education of Hmong, Somali, Latino and other immigrant students. Until recently she was an editorial fellow in the San Francisco office of Mother Jones, where she reported on labor and health care issues and fact-checked stories for the magazine and web. She graduated with a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School in 2019. While at Medill, she was a research assistant for the Chicago Tribune and published an investigation on Medicaid backlogs in the Chicago Sun-Times. Dernbach grew up outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and now calls Minneapolis home. Before she entered journalism, she worked in communications in the Twin Cities focused on racial justice issues. She’s also worked as a substitute teacher in the Minneapolis Public Schools. Dernbach is the author of a rhyming picture book about the 2008 foreclosure crisis, Fannie and Freddie.
Laurel Demkovich
Laurel Demkovich reports for The Spokesman-Review based in Spokane, Washington, and covers the Washington Legislature and state government. After graduating from Indiana University in May 2019, Demkovich completed an internship at The Washington Post where she covered cops and courts for the Post’s local desk. Demkovich also completed internships at the Tampa Bay Times and the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Massachusetts, covering local government, breaking news, and general assignments. While at Indiana University, Demkovich served as managing editor of the school’s student newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student. She has won several awards for her writing from the Indiana Professional Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Indiana Collegiate Press Association named her Brook Baker Collegiate Journalist of the Year in 2019. She also won first place in feature writing from The Hearst Journalism Awards Program.
Theresa Davis
Theresa worked as the editor of the Kemmerer Gazette in rural Wyoming for two years. Her work on the Bears Ears National Monument controversy in southern Utah earned awards from the National Newspaper Association, the Associated Press of Utah-Idaho-Spokane, the Utah Press Association and the Utah Society of Professional Journalists. Her coverage of the coal mining industry in southwest Wyoming earned awards from the Wyoming Press Association. As a student at Brigham Young University, she was the deputy editor at The Universe, the student-run publication. She grew up in the Texas Hill Country.
Miranda Cyr
Miranda Cyr reports for the Las Cruces Sun-News in Las Cruces, N.M., focusing on the condition of education as well as poverty. She reported for Cronkite News and Cronkite Noticias with Arizona PBS as a Spanish language and health reporter. She interned at Times Media Group in 2019 Tempe, Ariz. where she covered a range of topics for different local publications around the valley. In 2019, she traveled to Lima, Peru to report on the Venezuelan economic crisis that pushed tens of thousands of refugees into the city. Miranda grew up in Phoenix and first took an interest in journalism when she was 17. She graduated from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications in May 2020.
Emma Cotton
Emma Cotton reports for VTDigger, a news publication and watchdog based in Montpelier, Vermont, where she focuses on Southern Vermont, which has been plagued by everything from contaminated drinking water to population decline and opioid abuse. Since 2016, Cotton has been a Vermont based reporter and writer. For the Addison County Independent, she explored the intersection of agriculture and water quality decline in Lake Champlain for a three-part investigative series called “The Giving Stream.” Formerly, she served as assistant editor of Vermont Ski + Ride and Vermont Sports Magazines, where she won “Best Columnist” from the New England Newspaper & Press Association. Her work has also appeared in the University of Otago’s student publication, Critic Te Arohi, The St. Pete Catalyst, 5280 Magazine, and The Brandon Reporter. She was the editor-in-chief of Eckerd College’s student publication, The Current, where she won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for her coverage of the college’s attempt to change Campus culture surrounding sexual assault. She graduated with Eckerd’s first Bachelor of Science in the Creative Arts collegium after designing her own major in science journalism. Before joining RFA, Cotton toured the country in a homemade campervan.
Acacia Coronado
Acacia Coronado covers the Texas Legislature and the politics of climate change for The Associated Press. She is a recent graduate from the University of Texas at Austin. Her passion for storytelling led her to a bachelor of journalism degree. Most recently, she covered immigration and human rights as a fellow at The Texas Observer. She also did two semesters at The Texas Tribune as an investigative fellow, covering immigration, the Texas Legislature and criminal justice, and a summer in New York at The Wall Street Journal as a reporting intern with the U.S. News East Coast Bureau. She first fell in love with journalism as a Life and Arts reporter with The Daily Texan, the student newspaper, in 2016. She loves returning to her small-town roots and living her Catholic faith to the fullest.