WRITING

Ellen Wagner

Ellen Wagner reports on municipal services and budget cuts for Mahoning Matters, a new collaboration between Google and McClatchy news based in Youngstown, Ohio. Wagner knows Ohio. She covered health, local events, and crime as a metro intern at The Columbus Dispatch last summer. She was the editor-in-chief of The Post, an independent student newspaper at Ohio University and in the college town of Athens in the southern part of the state. Wagner also covered crime, courts and police in Athens during her four years at The Post. She graduated from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in the spring with a major in journalism news and information and a certificate in Italian studies. She is from Westlake, a suburb outside of Cleveland. Wagner, along with the other executive editors of The Post, won Society of Professional Journalists’ 2019 Mark of Excellence Award for editorial writing.

Bennett Leckrone

Bennett Leckrone is a reporter for Maryland Matters, a news nonprofit based in Takoma Park, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C. Leckrone will concentrate on state elections, money, and ethics. He is a recent graduate of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, and recently completed an internship at The Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, D.C.. Prior to graduating, he wrote about state and local governments during internships at The Columbus Dispatch, Dayton Daily News, PennLive.com and his hometown paper in Ohio, The Troy Daily News. Leckrone got his start covering city council meetings for the independent, student-run newspaper at Ohio University, The Post, and eventually became the paper’s long-form editor. Leckrone is a lifelong Ohio resident and has written extensively about Appalachian issues and the opioid epidemic.

Haley Samsel

Haley Samsel covers the consequences of economic growth for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She has covered everything from cybersecurity to home medical equipment as an associate editor for HME Business, Mobility Management and Security Today magazines in Dallas. Before graduating from American University in 2019, she reported on Capitol Hill for The Texas Tribune and interned for NPR’s education desk, USA Today College, The Investigative Reporting Workshop and The Washington Monthly. She served as editor-in-chief of The Eagle, the university’s student newspaper, where she worked with students to publish innovative digital projects and accountability reporting. More recently, Haley contributed articles on youth issues to YR Media. She grew up in the Dallas suburb of Plano.

Frank Vaisvilas

Frank Vaisvilas covers Native American issues in Wisconsin for the Green Bay Press-Gazette in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The state is home to 11 federally recognized Native American tribes. Yet there is little to no coverage of tribes in the state. Vaisvilas traces his own roots to the Yaqui, the indigenous people of Mexico. He has been writing feature stories for the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and the Daily Southtown the last seven years as well as serving as a breaking news weekend reporter for the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Tribune. Prior to this, Vaisvilas helped transform a shopper into an award-winning community newspaper with hard-hitting enterprise reporting, a professional redesign and an introduction of several sections. His work on rapidly rising property taxes for residents on Chicago’s south side was nominated for best investigative reporting by the Chicago Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. Adapting to newsroom layoffs of photographers, Vaisvilas expanded his photography skills with the use of professional cameras and his photographs have often been featured on the front pages of major newspapers.

Alex Schwartz

Alex Schwartz covers endangered species and water issues for the Herald and News in Klamath Falls, Ore., whose readership spans four large rural counties in southern Oregon and northern California. A writer, photographer and graphic designer reporting at the intersection of science and culture, he was previously a freelance data reporter with The New York Times, helping track every coronavirus case in the U.S. Alex has also interned at Popular Science, where he reported on daily scientific research and used science to help explain the news. He has a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, where he specialized in health, science and environmental reporting and was a managing editor of The Daily Northwestern. Alex is originally from Orlando, Florida.

Kevin Knodell

Kevin Knodell reports for Honolulu Civil Beat focusing on Hawaii’s large military and veterans’ presence. He was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq as a correspondent for Coffee or Die magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic began. His writing and photography have appeared in The Daily Beast, Playboy and Foreign Policy. He has reported from the field on Northeast Syria’s “Rojava Revolution,” covered U.S.-China military relations, examined America’s vast civil-military divide, interviewed refugees using art to fight terrorist ideology and profiled Iraqi Kurdistan’s nightlife. He’s the producer of the podcast “War College,” the co-creator of the graphic memoir Machete Squad and he wrote the Acts of Valor comic series in Naval History magazine. He’s a former contributing editor at the website War Is Boring, where he supervised field coverage of Iraq and Syria during the Yazidi genocide.

Camille von Kaenel

Camille is an environment reporter who has covered growth and development in San Diego County’s backcountry for inewsource, the aftermath of the Camp fire in Northern California for the Chico Enterprise-Record, and climate policy and politics in Washington D.C. for E&E News. Born in Switzerland and raised in California, she has a bachelor’s in international relations from the University of Geneva and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University in New York.

Dee Dwyer

Dee Dwyer is a photojournalist at the DCist in Washington, D.C. where she focuses on minority communities. She holds a BFA in Filmmaking and Digital Production from The Art Institute of Washington and has studied at The Art Institute of Miami. After graduating in 2012, Dwyer traveled to Cuba, Jamaica, Brazil and several states documenting daily life. Dee’s work has been exhibited at Photoville, Photoschweiz, and at The DC Arts Center and The Congress Heights Arts and Culture Center. Her work has been published on the sites of BET, Allure, W magazine, The Daily Mail, MetroUK and others.

Adria Walker

Walker covers education for the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y. Born, raised and educated in Mississippi, Walker worked as an editorial assistant at the Jackson Free Press, Mississippi’s alternative weekly. A 2019 cum laude graduate of Milsaps College, Walker was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, the Purple & White and president of the Black Student Union. As a journalist, she’s covered multiple issues and breaking news stories including a Confederate flag protest at the state capitol and an in-depth look at the racial overtones of a campus robbery. Her honors thesis examined the role of black women in modern American social movements. She also taught yoga at an alternative school in Jackson and participated in an archeological dig in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula.

Nushrat Rahman

Nusrat Rahman covers economic mobility for the Detroit Free Press. A born and raised Detroiter, she interned for Hour Detroit Magazine. She has freelanced for Model D and Tostada Magazine and contributed to The New York Times. As a graduate student of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Rahman has written about a school in the Bronx for new immigrants and Bangladeshis working within New York City’s fast-food industry. A 2018 graduate of Wayne State University, Rahman is set to graduate this spring from Columbia, where she has focused on narrative and investigative reporting. She’s a graduate of the Al-Ikhlas Training Academy, a non-profit, full-time Islamic school in Detroit.