WRITING

Michelle Liu

Michelle was a reporting intern for the Toledo Blade, and a general assignment intern for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. As a reporter for the Yale Daily News and a contributing reporter for the New Haven Independent, she shadowed canvassers in New Hampshire and covered labor unions in Connecticut. She was also a program coordinator for Yale’s Summer Journalism Program for high school students. Since joining Report for America, Liu has covered criminal justice for Mississippi Today. The Institute for Non-Profit News named Michelle’s reporting on the spike of prison deaths in Mississippi as one of the “Best in Nonprofit News” in 2018. Her continued reporting on this and other stories not only helped lead the MDOC to invite the FBI to get involved in the investigation of these deaths, but her dogged records requests were cited by the Department of Corrections while asking the Legislature to exempt agencies from parts of the Public Records Act. More recently, the Mississippi Humanities Council invited Michelle to moderate a panel titled, “Locked Up: Criminal Justice in Mississippi.” She continues this work in her second year with Report for America.

Megan Taros

Megan began at a small community newspaper in Los Angeles while attending community college. She continued this work at SFBay in San Francisco, Latin Times in New York and Patch in New Jersey. She has a B.A. in journalism from San Francisco State University and an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where she focused on Latino health and social issues.

Manuela Tobias

Manuela is a former staff writer for PolitiFact, where she covered politics, health care, immigration and international trade. She was also a researcher for Politico, a research assistant at The New Yorker, and an intern at New York Magazine. She was a 2018 International Fact-Checking Network Fellow and contributed research to an ASME award-winning multimedia feature, “This is The Story of One Block in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn”. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Tobias lived in New Hampshire, New Jersey and London before moving to Washington, D.C. She has a B.A. in comparative literature from Georgetown University.

Lorin Eleni Avendaño

Eleni is a multimedia reporter who was born and raised in Honolulu. As a business reporter at Pacific Business News, she covered health care, nonprofits and tourism, writing about the Affordable Care Act, alternative lodging and the controversy over the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii. She has won numerous awards for excellence in journalism from the Society of Professional Journalists Hawaii Chapter. Eleni studied international relations and communications at American University and will complete her master's degree in journalism from UC Berkeley in May 2019.

Lautaro Grinspan

Lautaro has been an editorial fellow for Washingtonian magazine, where he reported on the city’s Hispanic and immigrant communities, authoring Washingtonian’s first Spanish-language stories. Previously he interned at NPR (Weekend Edition) and WBUR in Boston. He also worked as an engagement manager at Vox.com and a digital attache aide and trade assistant at the U.S. Department of Commerce. As a student at Northeastern University, he was a college correspondent for USA Today.

Lauren Lindstrom

Lauren has been a reporter at The Blade in Toledo for nearly five years, most recently on the health beat covering everything from Ohio’s heroin and opioid epidemic to Toledo’s efforts to reduce childhood lead poisoning. Her work has won several state and local awards for investigation and breaking news, including the Press Club of Toledo’s 2017 Touchstone Award for a series examining the lack of local oversight on homes with unsafe lead levels. Originally from Wisconsin, she interned at the Green Bay Press Gazette and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Lauren majored in journalism with a minor in Spanish at Northwestern University, where she was news editor for North by Northwestern, an independent student magazine.

Kelan Lyons

Kelan was a staff writer for Salt Lake City Weekly, where he wrote about immigration, economic development and state and local politics. Before that, in Texas, he covered the Brazos County courthouse for the Bryan-College Station Eagle, where he won a 2018 Texas Associated Press Managing Editors first-place feature writing award for his story on how a 35-year-old cold case still affects the community. He was a fellow at City Bureau in Chicago, where he produced an audio documentary about police misconduct settlements. He majored in psychology at University of Pittsburgh and graduated with an M.S. from Northwestern University, where he was an Alfred Balk scholarship recipient.

Katherine Lewin

Katherine began her reporting career at Miami Today News and has worked as a freelance multimedia producer for Al Jazeera. In 2018, she received a grant from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting to cover Cuba’s housing crisis. Katherine has won several awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for both her reporting and photo essays. She earned a B.A. in journalism from Flagler College, where she worked at The Gargoyle student newspaper producing award-winning coverage of refugees and civil rights in Northeast Florida.

Kaitlin Washburn

Kaitlin has been a reporter and editor for the Columbia Missourian and a researcher for Investigative Reporters and Editors. She’s also interned for the Center for Responsive Politics, The Oregonian and The Morning Call. In 2018, Kaitlin was awarded the Keystone Press Award for Investigative Reporting by the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association for an investigation into the upkeep of fire department equipment, reporting she did as an intern for The Morning Call. She’s covered local, state and national politics, cannabis, campaign finance, dark money and the ouster of a mayor and a governor. Kaitlin graduated in May with a B.A. from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Kaitlin reports on how regulations are affecting farms of all sizes, how labor issues affect the poverty of farm workers, and how farm subsidies play a role in funding the production or non-production of crops in the area. Inside the nation’s most productive agricultural regions, reporting is increasingly difficult due to the private nature of large agricultural businesses and their operations, as well as the language and trust barriers between local media and farm laborers. The local economy is reliant on undocumented workers who pay into the social welfare system but do not have access to benefits of the system, such as health care, mental health and social security income. The local economy is also heavily subsidized by the government as farmers, both large and small, are paid to either produce, or in some cases, not produce crops to control the market.

Julia Fair

Julia has been a government watchdog reporter at The News Leader in Staunton, Virginia. Before that, she had internships with USA TODAY, the Kenosha News in Wisconsin, and the Rappahannock News in Virginia. She has won several awards including Virginia Press Honors for in-depth and investigative reporting. She’s a graduate of the Ohio University E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. Government watchdog reporting in Northern Kentucky Julia lives and works out of Northern Kentucky, watchdogging and explaining the efforts of the three major county governments, the major cities, and the state legislative efforts that are unique to Northern Kentucky. Among the topics of high concern to the Enquirer’s Northern Kentucky audience: growth, poverty, taxes and the upcoming 2019 gubernatorial election. In particular, she covers what local elected leaders are spending money on, what development projects they’re approving, the Frankfort delegation and how local schools are performing.