CINCINNATI – Five journalists who graduated from the University of Maryland will receive hands-on investigative reporting experience working at major media outlets as the new class of Roy W. Howard Fellows. The Scripps Howard Foundation is funding the yearlong fellowships.
The nonprofit newsrooms hosting the fellows during the program are: NPR, Inside Climate News, Wisconsin Watch, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and The Maine Monitor.
The fellowships honor Roy W. Howard, former chairman of the Scripps Howard newspaper chain and a pioneering news reporter whose relentless pursuit of the news took him around the world, spurred innovation and helped lay the groundwork for modern journalism.
The fellowships, which are awarded biannually, are given to graduates of the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University. The Howard Centers were established in 2018.
The 2025-26 Roy W. Howard Fellows:
Aidan Hughes
Hughes is an investigative data journalist from Westfield, New Jersey. He found his way into journalism after completing a master’s degree in conflict transformation at a university in Northern Ireland and an undergraduate degree in international studies and creative writing. Having worked previously in the private sector on data privacy issues, Hughes is passionate about building data tools for journalists that allow them to report on stories that would otherwise go untold. During his time at the Howard Center, Hughes contributed to data and investigative projects on privately sponsored travel for members of Congress. He built an archive of over 100,000 (and counting) Foreign Agent Registration Act filings and is currently developing a pipeline to extract valuable information from thousands of PDFs using a large language model. In July, he began his fellowship at Inside Climate News, where he reports on Congress and the current administration’s impact on the environment.
Paul Kiefer
As an investigative journalist, Kiefer has covered police union contracts, prison bureaucracy and rural sheriffs in Washington state; poultry, homelessness and corporate personhood in Delaware; and public transit funding, coal mining and immigration in Maryland. His reporting has appeared in High Country News and the Minnesota Star Tribune and has been credited by The Baltimore Banner and NPR, among other outlets. After receiving a master’s degree in data journalism from the University of Maryland, Kiefer is interning at The Washington Post this summer before beginning his Roy W. Howard fellowship with Wisconsin Watch in September. Kiefer is from Washington state.
Adriana Navarro
Navarro is an award-winning investigative and data journalist from Charlotte, North Carolina. She began her career in the weather industry, reporting on everything from live coverage of severe weather outbreaks to large data projects following disaster recovery efforts at AccuWeather. Navarro earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio University in 2018 with a specialization and certificate in women, gender and sexuality studies. After a few years reporting at AccuWeather, she became a part of the Howard Center at the University of Maryland, where she led a team investigating how lobbyists exploit legal loopholes to privately fund congressional travel. The story, which POLITICO also published, was part of a larger project that won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award in the large student project category. She has since interned at The Washington Post and The Baltimore Banner on their respective data desks, covering topics ranging from Baltimore’s opioid crisis to crypto’s role in the 2024 elections. In July, she began her fellowship at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, where she covers topics that fall within the intersection of gender, politics and policy.
Taylor Nichols
Nichols started her journalism career at her community college student newspaper in Bellingham, Washington, over a decade ago. Since then, her reporting has taken her across the map, from political reporting at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to covering housing and addiction in Washington, D.C. After earning her bachelor’s degree in journalism at Western Washington University, she went on to cover higher education, breaking down government data sets on salaries and student loan debt to help students make informed decisions about college. This work prompted her to study data journalism at the University of Maryland in 2023. In the first year of her graduate program, Nichols started freelancing for Street Sense, a publication covering homelessness in Washington, D.C. There, she created an application to scrape and analyze data on scheduled evictions, providing a way to easily monitor housing issues in the city and identify which communities are most at risk for eviction. After spending the summer on the data and investigations team at Bloomberg Industry Group, she will start her fellowship covering housing at The Maine Monitor in September.
Caley Fox Shannon
Shannon joined the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism in 2023 after nearly five years working as a documentary film producer. After obtaining her degree in French from Carleton College, she began her storytelling career at Breakwater Studios in Los Angeles. There, she co-produced numerous short films, including “A Concerto Is A Conversation,” which was nominated for Best Documentary, Short Subject at the 2021 Academy Awards. Her first feature documentary, “Fire Department, Inc.,” follows a small firefighting union’s heroic battle against the illegal privatization of their department in suburban Chicago. She was also a contributing producer to the Video Consortium’s “Rough Cut” podcast and associate-produced the 2024 Scripps Howard Journalism Awards. Additionally, Shannon produced award-winning work in the master’s program at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. Her audio reporting on divisions within the Fairfax County school board earned recognition from the Broadcast Education Association Awards. The Society for Professional Journalists awarded the 2024 Mark of Excellence in narrative podcasting to “Vinyl Revival,” a long-form piece Shannon co-executive produced on the renaissance of Zamrock, Zambia’s lost psychedelic genre. She also co-wrote the lead story in the Howard Center’s exposé on how lobbyists exploit legal loopholes to privately fund travel for House staffers. This story, published on POLITICO, won the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for a large student project. Shannon begins her fellowship at NPR in July. There, she will report for one year as part of their investigations team.
Learn more about the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism.
Media contact: Molly Miossi, 513-977-3713, [email protected]
About the Scripps Howard Foundation
The Scripps Howard Foundation is a private foundation established in 1962 to advance charitable causes important to The E.W. Scripps Company (NASDAQ: SSP) and the Scripps and Howard families. The Foundation is dedicated to creating informed and engaged communities through journalism education.