fall 2022 cohort

Raney Aronson-Rath is the editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, PBS’ flagship investigative journalism series, and a leading voice on the future of journalism. Aronson-Rath oversees FRONTLINE’s acclaimed reporting on air and online and directs the series’ editorial vision, executive producing over 20 documentaries each year on critical issues facing the country and world. Under her leadership, FRONTLINE has earned two Oscar nominations, and has won every major award in broadcast journalism, including Peabody Awards, Emmy Awards, an Institutional Peabody Award, and the first Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Gold Baton awarded in a decade.

Bob Cusack serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Hill newspaper/TheHill.com. Bob has been reporting on policy and politics in the nation's capital since 1995. He joined The Hill as Business and Lobbying Editor in 2003, became the newspaper's Managing Editor a year later and was tapped as Editor-in-Chief in 2014. He regularly appears on news networks as a non-partisan political analyst and has won six awards from the National Press Club and the Society of Professional Journalists. Bob is a member of the Screen Actors Guild and has appeared in commercials, feature films and television shows, including HBO's "Veep" and "Wonder Woman 1984."

Rebecca Landsberry-Baker is a Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and Ford Foundation JustFilms grantee and a 2022 NBC Original Voices Fellow. She is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and executive director of the Native American Journalists Association, a nonprofit organization advocating for accurate coverage and representation of Indigenous people in media. She serves as president of the Mvskoke Media Editorial Board and is a 2018 recipient of the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development’s “Native American 40 Under 40” award. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in journalism from the University of Oklahoma, with a degree in public relations and a minor in Native American studies. She is currently directing her first documentary feature film, which follows the story of free press within the Muscogee Nation.

Jonathan V. Lastis editor of The Bulwark, where he oversees the website, podcast, and newsletter products in addition to hosting a (couple of) show(s) and writing a daily newsletter, which is slowly killing him from the inside. Prior to launching The Bulwark, he spent 20 years at The Weekly Standard, where he performed a number of duties, from reporter, to features writer, to head of digital operations. He is the author of four books, including What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, and currently resides in New Jersey with his wife and four children.

Michael McCarter is the Managing Editor of Standards, Ethics, and Inclusion at USA TODAY and for the USA TODAY network. In his role, McCarter works closely with USA TODAY Network journalists across the country focusing on five building blocks that include ethics, standards, mentoring, employee learning & development and inclusion. McCarter previously served as executive editor of Evansville Courier & Press. Prior to his time in Evansville, McCarter worked for the Cincinnati Enquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Shreveport Times and the Pensacola News Journal.

Nneka Nwosu is an Assistant News Director at ABC7, Chicago's number one news station. In her role, Nneka oversees the station's Investigative team, Special Projects, Race & Culture team, and streaming newscasts. Prior to Chicago, Nneka worked at WCVB-TV as the Executive Producer of, "Chronicle," the longest running, nightly local news magazine show in the country. Prior to that role, she was a producer and started her journalism career as a reporter. Nneka is a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She also completed a year-long fellowship at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism in 2018. An Emmy award winning journalist, Nneka was named one of Boston Business Journal's 40 under 40 business leaders in 2019 and one of Boston's Most Influential Black Women in 2021.

Cheryl Phillips is the founder and director of Stanford University’s Big Local News, a data-sharing platform and computational collaborative in support of local journalism. She also is co-founder of the Stanford Open Policing Project, a cross-departmental effort to collect police interaction data and evaluate racial disparities. She is now part of the Community Law Enforcement Accountability Network, a national effort to collect, process and analyze police use of force and misconduct records. She teaches data and investigative journalism and has worked in numerous newsrooms, including The Seattle Times, USA TODAY, The Detroit News and newsrooms in Texas and Montana. During her time in Seattle, she twice covered breaking news that that received a Pulitzer Prize and twice worked on investigations that were Pulitzer finalists. Cheryl served on the board of directors for Investigative Reporters and Editors for a decade and is a former board president. In the early 1990s, she was a founding member of the Texas chapter of the NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists. She is a graduate of the Texas Christian University journalism program. She lives in Palo Alto with her wife, Catherine Phillips, and is the mother of 17-year-old twin sons.

David Rohde is the executive editor for news of NewYorker.com. A two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, he covered the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Bosnia and is a former reporter for Reuters, the New York Times, and the Christian Science Monitor. His most recent book, “In Deep,” investigated and refuted Donald Trump's claims that he was the victim of a "Deep State” plot. Rohde lives in New York with his wife and two daughters.

Terence Samuel is Vice President & Executive Editor at NPR. In this role, he is responsible for leading all of NPR's newsgathering teams. A graduate of the City College of New York, Samuel is the author of the 2010 book The Upper House: A Journey Behind the Closed Doors of the United States Senate. His work as a political columnist was anthologized in Best American Political Writing of 2009. Samuel joined NPR as a deputy managing editor in 2017. He was promoted in 2019 to the Managing Editor for News. In that role, he has been involved in every aspect of the daily work across all newsroom teams and has had a hand in guiding the coverage of the biggest stories of the last few years. He also spent time as the interim Executive Producer of Morning Edition during 2021. From 2011 to 2017, he was a politics editor at The Washington Post, overseeing White House and congressional coverage, and before that he was the congressional Managing Editor at National Journal. Samuel began his career as a writing fellow at The Village Voice in New York and later was a reporter at The Roanoke Times & World News, a national correspondent at both The Philadelphia Inquirer and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and chief congressional correspondent at US News & World Report. In the Fall of 2021, he was a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. He lives in Washington, DC.

Lauren Williams is cofounder and CEO of Capital B, a nonprofit local-national news organization serving Black audiences that launched in January 2022. Before starting Capital B, Lauren was senior vice president and editor in chief of Vox, where she managed editorial and business operations for the explanatory news network. In addition to Vox.com, Lauren oversaw one of YouTube’s largest news channels and more than a dozen podcasts, including the daily news show Today, Explained, and a TV operation anchored by the Netflix franchise Explained. Lauren previously served as executive editor and managing editor at Vox and has also been an editor at Mother Jones and deputy editor at The Root. Lauren serves on the board of directors for the International Women’s Media Foundation. She lives outside of Washington, DC, with her husband and two young children.

Sisi Wei is editor-in-chief at The Markup. Previously, she was co-executive director of OpenNews, where she founded the DEI Coalition, which is dedicated to sharing knowledge and taking concrete action in service of a more anti-racist, equitable, and just journalism industry. She was previously assistant managing editor at ProPublica, where she oversaw three editorial teams focused on news apps, interactive storytelling, and visual investigations. She also managed large, interdisciplinary investigations, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. In 2021, Sisi won the Gwen Ifill Award for her work supporting and elevating women of color in news media.

Kimi Yoshino is the Editor-in-Chief of The Baltimore Banner, a non-profit news startup that aims to deliver trustworthy and impactful local journalism that helps strengthen the city and state. Yoshino is a former managing editor at the Los Angeles Times, where she worked for 21 years as a reporter, editor and strategic leader. In 2011, she helped guide the paper’s investigation into corruption in the city of Bell, which was awarded the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service. A California native, Yoshino also previously worked as a reporter at The Fresno Bee and The Stockton Record.

Jose Zamora currently serves as EXILE’s chief communications and impact officer. He is a 2020 JSK Stanford Fellow, who has focused his career on the promotion of collaboration networks, innovation, and freedom of the press. He previously worked as senior vice president of Univision News (2012-2022). Prior to joining Univision, Jose managed Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge, an initiative to spur media innovation across the world. Zamora also helped manage Knight Foundation’s journalism program, where he helped develop over 100 grants to advance media innovation and freedom of the press. He has a law degree from Universidad Francisco Marroquín, a specialization in media law from Oxford’s Media Law Advocates Programme, and a master’s in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin. Jose served on the board of directors of the Online News Association for over six years, and currently serves on the board of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism Foundation, Ripple Effect Images, FIU’s Kopenhaver Center and on the advisory board of the Committee to Protect Journalists.