The latest class of Roy W. Howard Investigative Fellows will begin yearlong, post-graduate assignments in January at five nonprofit news organizations with deep commitments to investigative journalism.
The fellowships are the next step in the education and professional development of emerging investigative journalists. They are also an extension of the Scripps Howard Foundation’s commitment to the success of the award-winning Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism, which are funded by the Foundation. The Scripps Howard Foundation established the fellowship program in 2020 with an investment of up to $1.5 million in honor of Roy W. Howard, legendary journalist and news executive of The E.W. Scripps Company (NASDAQ: SSP).
The fellows are graduates of the Howard Centers at the Arizona State University Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the University of Maryland. They were selected by the news organizations through a competitive process. They will spend the year working side by side with reporters and editorial leaders at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), Inside Climate News, NPR, OpenSecrets and WBUR, Boston’s largest NPR affiliate.
Fellowships are awarded and administered in two annual cycles – January through December and July through June.
The spring 2022 class of Roy W. Howard Fellows:
Aydali Campa — Arizona State University
Campa, 25, earned her undergraduate degree in journalism and mass communication and a certificate in international studies from Arizona State University in 2018. Her experiences growing up on the U.S.-Mexico border and teaching third and fourth grade in Oklahoma City inform her reporting. She won a regional award and a national award for a feature about students crossing the U.S.-Mexico border daily to attend school in Arizona. Campa has used her multimedia skills and Spanish fluency to cover education, COVID-19 and natural-disaster recovery for local and national publications. Her work can be seen in The Wall Street Journal, The Arizona Republic and Arizona PBS. She begins her Roy W. Howard fellowship at Inside Climate News in January 2022.
Jimmy Cloutier — Arizona State University
Cloutier, a 29-year-old native of Richmond, Virginia, earned his undergraduate degree in English from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2014. He served in the U.S. Peace Corps in Armenia from 2015 to 2017. Before making a career switch to journalism, he worked in education and publishing. While completing his studies at Arizona State University’s Howard Center for Investigative Journalism, he reported on police surveillance and the economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. As an investigative fellow and data journalist for News21 at ASU, he analyzed census data to identify economic disparities between families living through the pandemic and reported on the lingering toll of COVID-19. He will be the Roy W. Howard fellow at OpenSecrets starting in January 2022.
Laura Kraegel — Arizona State University
Kraegel, a 31-year-old reporter from Mount Prospect, Illinois, earned her bachelor’s degree in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2013. She spent almost five years covering local news as a radio reporter in Nome and Unalaska, Alaska, before joining the investigative graduate program at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. There, Kraegel has served as a reporter and data analyst at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism and will complete her master’s degree in investigative journalism in 2021. She will be the Roy W. Howard fellow at WBUR, Boston’s NPR news station, starting in 2022.
Nick McMillan — University of Maryland
McMillan, 25, earned his undergraduate degree in statistics from Rice University in 2019. After college, he spent a year as a Scripps Howard Fellow in the Scripps Washington Bureau, where he helped uncover white supremacists in the U.S. armed forces and documented the lasting impact of an earthquake on Puerto Rican school children. At UMD, the Vancouver, Washington, native has used his data-journalism skills to produce stories on essential workers who were put at risk during the COVID pandemic and on efforts to evict public-housing residents as the virus was raging. McMillan, who is fluent in Spanish and German, used his video skills to produce a minidocumentary on the little-known 1919 massacre of Black residents in Elaine, Arkansas. He will be one of two Roy W. Howard fellows at NPR starting in 2022.
Allison Mollenkamp — University of Maryland
Mollenkamp, 25, graduated from the University of Alabama with a bachelor’s degree in English in 2018. During college and before joining the master’s program at UMD, Mollenkamp worked for public radio stations in Alaska, Alabama and Nebraska, as well as for NPR in Washington, D.C., during the summers of 2018 and 2021. As a full-time reporter for Nebraska Public Media from 2018 to 2020, Mollenkamp focused on the impact of extensive flooding in the state in 2019 and its recovery from that disaster. There and at UMD, the Jefferson City, Missouri, native dug deep into how the pandemic affected essential workers, producing stories and the Howard Center’s first podcast, which focused on airport workers. She was also a reporter on the Howard Center’s investigation of evictions by public housing authorities as COVID was spreading. She will be a Roy W. Howard fellow at NPR starting in 2022.
Nicole Sadek — Arizona State University
Sadek, 23, was born in Egypt and raised in South Carolina, and earned her bachelor’s degree in international studies and creative writing from Emory University in May 2020. She will complete her master’s degree in investigative journalism from ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication in 2021. Sadek served as editor-in-chief of The Emory Wheel, which received nine Georgia College Press Association and three Society of Professional Journalists awards during her tenure. She has professional experience covering poll closures, CARES Act funding, federal policy and congressional candidates for Bloomberg Government, The Arizona Republic, Georgia Public Broadcasting and Kathimerini, Greece’s English-language daily newspaper exclusively distributed with The International New York Times. Sadek will be the Roy W. Howard fellow at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists beginning in January 2022.
Zoha Tunio — Arizona State University
Tunio, 25, was born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in media studies in 2018. Following her graduation, Tunio worked as an editorial assistant for the sociopolitical monthly magazine Newsline, where she co-wrote a cover story about the #MeToo movement in Pakistan, produced a special report on access to safe abortions and reported on emerging start-ups across the country. She is completing her master’s degree in investigative journalism as a Fulbright scholar at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She will be a Roy W. Howard Fellow at Inside Climate News starting in January 2022.
About the Scripps Howard Foundation
The Scripps Howard Foundation supports philanthropic causes important to The E.W. Scripps Company (NASDAQ: SSP) and the communities it serves, with a special emphasis on journalism education, excellence in journalism and childhood literacy. At the crossroads of the classroom and the newsroom, the Foundation is a leader in supporting journalism education, scholarships, internships, minority recruitment and development and First Amendment causes. The Scripps Howard Awards stand as one of the industry’s top honors for outstanding journalism and the Foundation’s annual “If You Give a Child a Book …” childhood literacy campaign has distributed more than 500,000 new books to children in need across the nation since 2017. In support of its mission to create a better-informed world, the Foundation also partners with Scripps brands to create awareness of local issues and support impactful organizations to drive solutions that help build thriving communities.
Media Contact: Michael Perry, The E.W. Scripps Company, [email protected]