WRITING

Jennifer Whidden

Jenny Whidden reports on the effects of climate change on Chicago’s suburbs for the Daily Herald, based in Arlington Heights, Illinois. A second-year Report for America corps member, Whidden previously was a Statehouse reporter for New Hampshire’s Granite State News Collaborative, covering legislation related to racial justice. A native of Rolling Meadows, Illinois, Whidden holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Marquette University. There, she was managing editor of the student paper, the Marquette Tribune, which won top honors in General Excellence from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. Whidden enjoys going to the movies, reading fiction and spending time with Princeton, her cat.

Laura Harbert Allen

Laura Harbert Allen covers the intersection of religion, politics and culture for 100 Days in Appalachia, a nonprofit digital news organization. Prior to joining 100 Days, she contributed to podcasts such as “Making Contact,” “Us & Them,” “Freakonomics Radio” and “Inside Appalachia.” Allen is completing her Ph.D. at the Scripps College of Communication at Ohio University, where she has taught media criticism and audio/podcasting for three years. Her career in media—a total accident—began when she unknowingly walked into a public radio studio in New Bern, North Carolina. She has since been a public media host, reporter, producer and manager in New Bern, Richmond, Kentucky, and West Virginia, and for eight years she was the communications director for the West Virginia United Methodist Conference.

Michael Loria

Michael Loria reports for the Chicago Sun-Times, covering the South and West sides of the city. Before moving to Chicago, Loria was a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C., where he covered undocumented restaurant workers for Washington City Paper, and child care for undocumented workers, housing for older adults and more for The Washington Post. In 2020, his feature on cottage industries that undocumented workers had established to survive the pandemic became one of the most-read Washington City Paper stories of the year; his reporting on food truck turf wars was an editor’s choice for one of the best Washington City Paper stories of 2021. Loria is a graduate of the University of Virginia.

Rose Wong

Rose Wong covers early childhood education for The Oregonian/OregonLive in Portland. Wong graduated from Duke University, where she was senior editor of the student paper, The Chronicle. In 2020, she won top honors in the university’s Melcher Family Award for Excellence in Student Journalism, which recognized her series exposing a pattern of misdiagnoses and inadequate care at the Duke Student Health Center. The reported columns and Wong’s personal story of misdiagnosis were recognized in a Washington Post investigation on college health centers across the country. As a college intern for the Tampa Bay Times, Wong covered breaking news, while reporting on the outbreak of COVID-19 cases in the region’s nursing homes and the operational failures that enabled it. Wong speaks fluent Cantonese and Mandarin, and is from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Tandy Lau

Tandy Lau reports on public safety for the New York Amsterdam News in the historic Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem. Before joining Report for America, Lau was down the street working on his master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University, and reporting on race, sports and workers’ rights as a student journalist. He hails from Los Angeles, where he began working in minority press as a regular contributor to Character Media, an Asian American entertainment magazine. When he’s not writing or reporting, Lau can be found watching boxing and struggling to keep his houseplants alive.

Abigail Nehring

Abigail Nehring covers commercial and residential real estate for The Riverdale Press, a news site and weekly paper in the northwest section of the Bronx, a borough of New York City. Previously, she reported on health and education for The New Bedford Light in her home state of Massachusetts. Nehring won a New York Press Club Award for her reporting in City Limits on an East Village landlord caught on tape illegally harassing tenants and, along with Julia Angwin, was a finalist for the John Jay/H.F. Guggenheim Prize for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting for their story on police use of stun grenades, known as flash-bangs, published by Propublica and The Atlantic. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and has also worked as a writing teacher, fact-checked magazine stories, and tended numerous varieties of thyme in a greenhouse.

Brooke Schultz

Brooke Schultz is a Statehouse reporter for The Associated Press in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Before joining the AP, she was a digital editor for the Delaware State News, and has covered education for the Newark Post in Newark, Delaware. A graduate of Washington College, Schultz was editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, The Elm.

Danielle Duclos

Danielle DuClos reports on K-12 education in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for the Green Bay Press- Gazette, part of the USA Today Network. Prior to joining the Press-Gazette, DuClos reported for ABC News, The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting and the Anchorage Daily News. A recent graduate of the University of Missouri, where she was a state government reporter for the Columbia Missourian, the university’s community paper, DuClos holds a bachelor’s degree in investigative reporting and pre-law political science. She is passionate about the law and has interned for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Raised in Anchorage, Alaska, DuClos was a senior producer of “Podcast in Place,” a youth-run podcast that chronicled the impact of COVID-19 on Alaskan communities, and loves to spend time in the mountains and on the water.

Hosam Elattar

Hosam Elattar covers local government and the Muslim and Arab communities for Voice of OC, a digital news outlet in Orange County, California, one of the largest counties in the U.S. This new Report for America position allows him to continue working for this nonprofit publication. As a reporting fellow at Voice of OC, he covered local school districts, homelessness, affordable housing and more. Elattar, along with several colleagues, won top honors from the California News Publishers Association for their wildfire news coverage. A graduate of California State University, Fullerton, where he was a reporter and editor at the  student paper, the Daily Titan, Elattar also speaks Arabic and Spanish and has lived in Botswana, Nepal, Uganda, the Dominican Republic and India. He hopes to become a foreign correspondent in the Middle East and start his own newsroom.

Jesse Bedayn

Jesse Bedayn reports on Colorado’s Statehouse with a focus on housing for The Associated Press. A second-year corps member, he previously covered California’s wealth inequality for The Mercury News and CalMatters, connecting policy decisions to the voices of those impacted on the ground. An investigation by Bedayn exposed how low-income seniors become stranded in nursing homes and how their pleas for help go unanswered. That investigation was carried over from his work at the Investigative Reporting Program and as a stringer for The New York Times. He holds a master’s degree in narrative writing and investigative reporting from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Kent in England. Having grown up in California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains, Bedayn can be found bumming around the wild or woodworking.