WRITING

WBHM 90.3

Birmingham-based WBHM serves a city that is home to a vibrant arts community and a nationally-recognized culinary scene. There are auto parts manufacturers and chicken processing plants. Farms dot Alabama’s rural landscape. The University of Alabama at Birmingham is a major research institution. Hispanics make up a growing share of our area. WBHM is the lead station for the Gulf States Newsroom.

F. Amanda Tugade

F. Amanda Tugade reports for MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, which is based in Memphis, Tennessee. She focuses on poverty, power and public policy in Memphis and Shelby County. Previously, Tugade has covered Chicago and its surrounding suburbs. She has primarily worked as a reporter for local media outlets, including Shaw Media, the former 22nd Century Media and the Chicago Tribune/Pioneer Press newspapers. Her stories have also been featured in the Chicago Reader, Chicago Magazine, the Chicago Defender. She has won awards from the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association and the Illinois Press Association for her in-depth profiles of community leaders. Recently, Tugade was named a 2019 Peter Lisagor Award finalist. She’s a graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Olivia Richard

Olivia has been associate producer at KJZZ, the NPR station in Phoenix, a reporting intern at KNBC in Los Angeles, and an intern at Arizona PBS, where she covered education, the borderlands, and the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. She is also a game developer, focused on new ways of distributing news content. She has won several prestigious awards including Emma Bowen Award for Courage in Reporting, First Place for BioTech Science Reporting, First Place for radio features at the Festival of Media Arts. She received her B.A. from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University.

Ryan Tarinelli

Ryan has been the crime reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, where he anchored the paper’s coverage of gun violence and gang problems. He has also worked as a temporary legislative correspondent for the Associated Press in Nevada and Texas. Earlier, he had internships with the Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; the News Tribune in Tacoma, Washington; and the Moscow-Pullman Daily News in Idaho. He attended University of Idaho, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the student-run newspaper, The Argonaut.

Lily Burris

Lily Burris covers wealth and poverty in Kentucky for the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting in Louisville. Prior to joining the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, Burris worked as the tornado recovery reporter for WKMS-FM in Murray, Kentucky on a Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant. Her work focused on the communities across west and central Kentucky that were devastated by a sudden tornado outbreak in December 2021 and their efforts to come back from the losses they faced. She started in journalism as a reporter at her college newspaper, the College Heights Herald at Western Kentucky University. By her senior semester in college, Burris was the editor-in-chief of the publication, where she also worked as assignment editor, administration reporter, and general assignment reporter. In college, Burris also interned for Louisville Public Media, attended the Danish School of Media and Journalism, and won the Jon Fleischaker Freedom of Information Award from Kentucky Press Association at the collegiate level for her work on a piece focused on sexual misconduct records and Title IX.
Cassandra Stephenson

Cassandra Stephenson

Cassandra Stephenson covers issues impacting rural West Tennessee for The Tennessee Lookout. Prior to joining The Tennessee Lookout, Cassandra covered Metro Nashville government at The Tennessean for nearly three years, chronicling the consequences of policy decisions for residents in one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. Cassandra's post-collegiate reporting career began in West Tennessee in 2018 when she moved from her hometown in Ventura County, California after graduating from Pepperdine University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. There, she reported on breaking news and justice for a 13-county region, publishing award-winning investigations on local physicians’ involvement in the opioid epidemic and conditions in local for-profit prisons. Cassandra joined The Tennessean as a business reporter in 2020, covering pandemic-related business challenges including unemployment, workplace safety and eviction. Outside of the newsroom, you'll find Cassandra immersed in her latest art project or baking endeavor.  

Corli Jay

Corli Jay is the community investment reporter for Chicago-based digital news site The TRiiBE. Most recently she worked as a general assignment reporter at Crain's Chicago Business, where she covered the media beat. Jay started her career in journalism in 2020 as a fellow of the civic journalism lab City Bureau. She soon began freelancing for other publications that included Chicago Magazine and Chicago Reader. Jay would go on to write for the Hyde Park Herald, the city's oldest neighborhood newspaper. She graduated from Chicago State University with a bachelor's in media arts in 2018.  
PR Lockhart

P.R. Lockhart

P.R. Lockhart covers politics and power in Greensboro, North Carolina, for The Assembly. Before joining The Assembly, Lockhart worked as an economic development reporter in West Virginia covering labor and tax policy, workforce development, and business impacts on rural communities. Her background is in national reporting on race, justice and equity, and she has previously worked as a race and identity reporter for Vox, a Ben Bagdikian Editorial Fellow for Mother Jones, and as a freelance writer covering Black communities, voting rights, and policing for various outlets, including NBC News and the Guardian US. She is a 2024 Gwen Ifill Fellow through the International Women’s Media Foundation. Lockhart graduated from Duke University with a bachelor's degree in psychology and a certificate in policy journalism and media studies.  
Grace Fiori

​Grace Fiori

​Grace Fiori covers how agricultural and other industries environmentally impact the Tribal Nations along the Missouri River. The tribes have a long and storied history with the sacred waters of the Missouri. Prior to joining Buffalo’s Fire, Grace reported on the intersection of local economies and agricultural systems, first as an intern and then as a contributing reporter for the Harvard Press in Harvard, Massachusetts. She will graduate in May from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and sustainable agriculture, having served as the managing editor of the student newspaper, the Massachusetts Daily Collegian. Grace has been passionately involved in both journalism and agriculture since her teenage years, spending multiple seasons on diversified vegetable farms, most recently with the UMass Student Farming Enterprise.
Lia Salvatierra

Lia Salvatierra

Lia Salvatierra covers all local government for the Ouray Plaindealer. Prior to joining the Plaindealer, she reported for a number of non-profit news organizations, including an internship at Wyofile, where she reported on Wyoming's education systems and Latinx and Indigenous communities. She has completed additional research internships from Minneapolis, MN, to Berlin, Germany. Lia is a California native and recent graduate from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. When she’s not hopping on an interview, she loves leading outdoor excursions from North Carolina’s mountains to beaches for her peers.