WRITING

Sam Ogozalek

Sam Ogozalek reports for The Island Packet in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He covers economic development in Jasper County, South Carolina, which is seeing burgeoning growth as new residents, many of them retirees from out of state, settle in this historically African-American area. Ogozalek covered cops, courts and local government during internships at the Tampa Bay Times, The Buffalo News, and the Naples Daily News. An investigative reporter who is adroit at FOIA and other document requests, Ogozalek uncovered conflicts of interest while as an intern in Naples on a design review board in a nearby town that led to a proposed new ethics ordinance. He recently assisted with FOIA research at the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. He was the 2018-19 editor-in-chief of Syracuse University’s independent student newspaper, The Daily Orange. Ogozalek grew up in Hancock, New York, a small town along the Delaware River.

Seyma Bayram

Seyma Bayram covers minority and immigrant communities for the Akron Beacon Journal in Akron, Ohio. Previously, Bayram was a staff reporter at the Jackson Free Press in Jackson, Mississippi, where she covered local government and criminal justice. Her reporting on Mississippi’s sentencing laws and efforts to prevent the state from demolishing a Jackson landmark earned Bayram two first-place awards from the Associated Press. She was an invited speaker to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s 2020 Sharing Knowledge Conference on a panel about the intersection of public health and mass incarceration. Before journalism, Bayram worked as a high-school writing teacher in Brooklyn, New York, and as a book editor for a European experimental arts non-profit organization, where she collaborated on several anthologies that examine the role of culture in contemporary political movements. She is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Journalism and she received an M.A. and B.A. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. She is from the Kurdish region of Turkey and was raised in The Netherlands and upstate New York.

Laurence Du Sault

Laurence Du Sault covers childhood poverty in San Jose and the Bay Area as part of “The California Divide” project. Before coming to the Mercury News she covered the coronavirus pandemic as a stringer for the New York Times and as a researcher for the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she investigated police criminality for the IRP as part of a statewide coalition of news organizations examining California law enforcement. Du Sault is a recipient of the Society of Professional Journalist’s James Madison Student Journalist Freedom of Information Award, a fellow for the National Institute for Climate Education, as well as a recipient of the Randy Shilts Award for Exceptional Reporting. At Berkeley, she wrote magazine features on the environment and Indigenous affairs, reporting from Native American communities in the Golden State. After completing an internship at CIBL 101,5, public radio in Montreal, Du Sault lived and freelanced in Mexico for a year, where she perfected her Spanish and taught children in Mérida. She grew up in a strictly French-speaking home in Canada and moved to Australia at 18 to learn English. She is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal. 

Maria Sestito

Maria Sestito reports for The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, California, where she focuses on issues facing the areas exploding senior citizen population. Before earning her master’s degree at the University of California-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in May 2020, Sestito was the public safety reporter at the Napa Valley Register. While there, she covered murder trials and the North Bay Wildfires. She also started her own lifestyle column called “Jersey Girl.” Before moving to California, Sestito worked at The Daily News in Jacksonville, N.C. as a photographer and general assignment reporter. She is originally from New Jersey and received a B.A. in Middle Eastern Studies from Rutgers University in 2012. Sestito has won several California News Publishers Association awards for Best Writing, Best Column, and Breaking News. She is a recipient of the U.S. Department of Education’s Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship for the study of Arabic and a Bloomberg-UNC-Berkeley Business Journalism Diversity Fellow. At Berkeley, she won the Dean’s Merit Fellowship.  

Elizabeth Moomey

Liz Moomey reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader in Kentucky where she focuses on watchdog reporting in eastern Kentucky, specifically Pike County. She was a reporter for the Salisbury Post in North Carolina where she covered the city and politics, along with the town of Landis. Her reporting sparked an embezzlement investigation into two town employees. She previously worked at the North State Journal as a reporter and page designer. Moomey has been awarded by the North Carolina Press Association for feature writing, news enterprise reporting and design. She was also a sports clerk and writer for the News & Observer and a web producer for Spectrum News, both in Raleigh, North Carolina. Liz was the editor of North Carolina State University’s yearbook Agromeck, which won the Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s Gold Crown award. She is a graduate of North Carolina State University and serves on the annual publications advisory board helping to select the incoming editor of the yearbook and literary magazine.

Adam Wagner

Adam has worked for six years at The Wilmington StarNews in North Carolina covering local government, public safety, criminal justice and the environment. Since late 2016, his reporting has focused on water contamination in eastern North Carolina, while he has also covered Hurricanes Florence and Matthew and their aftermaths. He’s won awards for investigative and enterprise reporting from the North Carolina Press Association, the D.C. Press Association and the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania. Adam is a graduate of Ohio University, where he was managing editor of the school paper. Watchdog reporting on Hurricane Florence recovery in Raleigh, North Carolina The News & Observer is dedicated to covering the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, which destroyed lives, homes and businesses around North Carolina.  Adam is assigned to the newsroom’s ongoing efforts to cover cleanup, rebuilding and revitalizing communities following Hurricane Florence — a process that will take years. His primary focus is  investigating and reporting on how last year’s disaster disproportionately affects low-income residents and people of color in North Carolina. He works closely with our data journalist and three other reporters who are covering the flood’s aftermath. Adam reports directly to one of the newsroom’s most experienced and highly regarded editors, with assistance from the managing editor.

Nadia Lopez

Nadia Lopez covers Latino issues in the San Joaquin Valley for The Fresno Bee. Before that, she worked as a city hall reporter for San José Spotlight, where she covered politics, government, the housing crisis and homelessness. Her groundbreaking stories have led to shifts in local elections and policy changes. She has won several awards, including two California Journalism Awards in the writing and land-use categories for a story that involved spending the night on an overnight bus that homeless residents used as shelter and for covering displacement in the city’s historic East Side. She grew up in Chula Vista, California, a border town. She received her B.A. from San Francisco State University.

Mary Norkol

Mary Norkol reports for The Sun News, the newspaper based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where she focuses on homelessness. This is an underreported topic in the resort area with unique aspects including family members who follow their retiree relatives to the region but don’t have enough money for housing. Norkol wrote features for “The FBI Files” and “Murals and Mosaics” projects while working as an intern at the Chicago Sun-Times and worked on the investigative team during an internship with CBS in Chicago. She was editor-in-chief of Loyola University Chicago’s independent student newspaper, which won first place in its general excellence category by the Illinois College Press Association. Norkol was recognized for her work on a podcast covering the Mercy Hospital shooting and multimedia reporting on sexual assault solve rates in Chicago. A true Midwesterner, Norkol grew up in Stillwater, Minnesota, and spends her vacations and holidays in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Megan Taros

Megan Taros reports for The Arizona Republic where she concentrates on the Latino and African-American communities in South Phoenix. Most recently, Taros covered Latino affairs across an eight-county swath in Twin Falls, Idaho, where she launched the beat at the local paper. There she was a part of numerous community engagement efforts that included getting Latino students interested in media, listening sessions and launching a series on representation in education, politics, business and health. She is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she covered health disparities, income inequality and immigration in the Latino communities of Corona and Elmhurst, Queens, New York. She’s covered education and local government in southern New Jersey, San Francisco and her native Los Angeles.

Stephanie Garcia

Stephanie García reports for The Baltimore Sun focusing on Latinos, the fastest-growing ethnic group in the Maryland city. She is a former news assistant for PBS NewsHour and a foreign desk intern for The Independent. Garcia spent two years teaching English in Madrid. As an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in Arizona, she was an Adult Education Coordinator assisting refugees in Phoenix. Originally from Queens, New York, Garcia graduated magna cum laude from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.