Report for America on Thursday announced the selection of 225 journalists for its 2020 reporting corps, including two reporters who will join Oklahoma Watch in June to cover issues related to poverty and criminal justice.
The national program, an initiative of the The GroundTruth Project, a nonprofit, said it will place its journalists with more than 160 local news organizations in 45 states and Puerto Rico.
“These reporting positions come at a time when local journalism is already reeling from years of newsroom cuts and unforeseen challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic,” Report for America said in a news release.
Joining Oklahoma Watch will be Keaton Ross, a spring 2020 graduate of Oklahoma Christian College, and Supriya Sridhar, a December 2018 graduate of the University of Oklahoma.
Ross majored in journalism and minored in political science and served as editor of The Talon, the student newspaper at Oklahoma Christian. His reporting on an admissions counselor who led a racist activity at a high school was cited by several national news organizations, including The New York Times. He has interned at The Oklahoman and The Norman Transcript.
Sridhar was a magazine intern at Politico in 2019, where she researched projects and reported for Politico’s policy team. She has interned at The Oklahoman, The Wichita Eagle and the Louisville Courier-Journal, where she produced a story about the national shortage of emergency medical services workers caused by burnout and low pay. She received a bachelor’s in journalism at OU and held leadership positions at the student newspaper.
