WRITING

Cybele Mayes-Osterman

Before joining The Associated Press, Mayes-Osterman covered the Pentagon and national security from Washington, D.C., for USA TODAY. She previously worked as an associate producer for PBS NewsHour and Washington Week. A New Mexico native, Mayes-Osterman entered journalism as an intern at the Santa Fe Reporter. She holds a degree in English literature, creative writing, and East Asian studies from Barnard College. Outside of work, she sings jazz.

Ellis Juhlin

Prior to joining Mountain Journal, Juhlin was Montana Public Radio's first Environment and Climate reporter. For four years she covered state and federal policy, wildlife, natural resources, and agriculture - and the threads of climate change woven throughout those stories. She is experienced in converting local stories for a national audience and her pieces are regularly picked up by NPR. Her journalism career began unconventionally. While getting her master's in ecology at Utah State University, she began working as a science reporter for her local public radio station. Through that experience with Utah Public Radio, she fell in love with storytelling and being able to use her research background to communicate to a wide audience. In addition to her master's, she also has an undergraduate degree in ecology. When she's not reporting you can find her birding, or on a trail with her three dogs or wrangling a bevy of runner ducks at her home in western Montana.

Elijah de Castro

Elijah de Castro reports on health disparities for WAER, Syracuse Public Media. Prior to WAER, he was the health reporter at The Keene Sentinel, where he led the Monadnock Region Health Reporting Lab, a newsroom journalism project focused on investigative and solutions journalism about New Hampshire’s health care system. Previously, he was a climate fellow at the Solutions Journalism Network and a Report for America corps member in South Carolina, where he was on the rural communities beat covering issues like systemic poverty and gun violence in rural Allendale County. He got his start in journalism as News Editor of The Ithacan, the student newsroom of Ithaca College, where he graduated in 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He is an avid player of pool and ping pong.

Jacqueline GaNun

GaNun is currently a Federal Impact Reporter at The Associated Press. She previously worked as a Dow Jones News Fund intern on the publishing desk at The Wall Street Journal, business news intern at NPR and reporting fellow at The Current of coastal Georgia. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia, where she also earned bachelor’s degrees in journalism and international affairs. At her independent student newspaper, The Red & Black, she served as editor-in-chief and won an award from the Georgia College Press Association for an article about unaffordable housing. GaNun has run two half-marathons on two continents.

Mikella Schuettler

Mikella Schuettler covers the impact of federal politics on communities across Arizona. Before joining the Associated Press, she reported on crime, courts and the craziness of New York City for Bloomberg and the New York Post. This included covering the Sean “Diddy” Combs trial and tracking asylum denial rates across New York’s immigration judges. Schuettler is from Alberta, Canada, but grew up in South Africa, Thailand and Singapore. She recently earned a master’s degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, specializing in data journalism, and loves hunting for the story in the numbers.

Shelby Swanson

Shelby Swanson covers sports business for The Minnesota Star Tribune. Born and raised in North Carolina, she most recently covered UNC athletics for The Raleigh News & Observer. At the N&O, she broke news pertaining to university legal matters and led coverage of the Smith Center arena debate — using public records and source-building to give readers visibility into decisions that weren’t meant to be visible. Her work at the N&O earned four APSE Top-10 finishes in breaking news, long feature and short feature categories. Swanson’s journalism career started when she joined her high school newspaper and soon discovered nobody wanted to lead the sports desk. She holds degrees in Media & Journalism and Hispanic Literatures & Cultures from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she served as sports editor of the independent student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel. When she’s not chasing a story, Swanson is playing pickup basketball, discovering new music or binge-watching Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Colin Tiernan

Before joining CT Insider, Tiernan worked on his family’s farm in Connecticut. And before that, he spent six years at papers out West. He’s covered every beat at one time or another. Tiernan is conversationally fluent in Spanish, a tenacious defender in pick-up basketball and a mediocre-but-passionate wildlife photographer.

Cheree Franco

Cheree Franco is an award-winning print and photojournalist. She has profiled both a US Senator and the founder of OkCupid, covered South by Southwest and Sundance festivals, reported for three months from the Dakota Access Pipeline protest camps, and followed the grassroots caretakers at New Orlean’s Lincoln Beach, a segregation-era Black beach that has been officially closed since 1964 but never abandoned by users. In Arkansas, she investigated a 20-year-old murder conviction, highlighting procedural errors and details that juries never heard. Her coverage ultimately helped the Innocence Project secure a woman’s release from a life sentence without parole. She has reported from New York, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Pakistan, with work appearing in newspapers on two continents, as well as in VICE, Huck, Places Journal and elsewhere. Most recently, she taught journalism at Tulane University.

James Soderling

James Soderling is an civic and community reporter at CivicLex as part of a pilot partnership with Press Forward Blue Grass, which trains community members to work as journalists in their hometowns. Soderling was born and raised in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and is a recent graduate of Transylvania University. Before joining Report for America, Soderling reported for his university's newspaper, The Rambler, and worked at Community Action Council through his AmeriCorps service. He also interned at Kentucky Refugee Ministries and worked on Charles Booker's U.S. Senate campaign. Soderling's interest in journalism was solidified through his thesis on coal-dependent communities in transition, which combined on-the-ground reporting tactics with policy research to examine how places like his hometown adapt to economic change.

Nick Mott

Nick Mott covers the Greater covers wildlife, public lands, water and wildfire, and their impacts on communities and landscapes in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem for Montana Free Press and Mountain Journal. His position is part of a partnership with High Country News Western Environmental Collaborative (WERC). Prior to joining Report for America as a corps member, Mott worked in both print and audio. He led podcasting efforts at Montana Public Radio, and his narrative nonfiction productions received some of the highest awards in the field, including a Peabody and two National Edward R. Murrow Awards. He co-authored the book This Is Wildfire, published in 2023 by Bloomsbury, and his print and audio reporting has appeared in High Country News, NPR, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New York Times and many other outlets.