WASHINGTON — The GroundTruth Project and Report for America are proud to welcome two Emma Bowen Foundation Fellows, Alina Panek and Nik Popli, to the team.
This summer marks GroundTruth’s third year of partnership with Emma Bowen, which provides multi-year internships to students of color at media companies across the country.
Alina Panek, who will be working on Report for America, is a 2020 graduate of Denison University Communication and Narrative Journalism who is from and based in Chicago. She won her college’s Presidential medal for her leadership, academic success and contribution to cross-cultural engagement. At Denison, she volunteered to teach English to central Ohio refugees, served as editor of her college newspaper The Denisonian and founded a support organization for fellow first-gen students.
Nik Popli, who will be working on GroundTruth’s democracy and migration reporting initiatives, is a rising fourth-year student at the University of Virginia studying Media Policy & Ethics, Government and Social Entrepreneurship. At UVA, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of The Cavalier Daily – the independent, student-run newspaper serving the University and Charlottesville communities since 1890 – where he manages a staff of 400 student volunteers. He is also the recipient of the 2019 Virginia Press Association’s first-place award in investigative reporting.
“I am so very excited to be working with Nik and Alina this summer. They are smart, eager, thoughtful and their passion for journalism is palpable,” said Alison Bethel McKenzie, Report for America’s director of corps excellence. “I also am happy to continue our relationship this summer with the Emma Bowen Foundation, whose mission of diversity and inclusion is so in line with Report for America’s.”
About The GroundTruth Project
The GroundTruth Project is an award-winning, independent, nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to supporting the next generation of journalists around the world. Our mission is to restore journalism from the ground up by enabling in-depth, on the ground field reporting on social justice issues in under-covered corners of the world. Since GroundTruth launched, we have supported more than 300 emerging journalists across more than 30 countries and been honored with the News Emmy, World Press Photo, Alfred I. duPont/Columbia University, Edward R. Murrow, Overseas Press Club and Online Journalism Award among others. GroundTruth is home to Report for America, which seeks to address a crisis in local journalism in the United States that has become a crisis for our democracy.
About Report for America
Report for America is a national service program that places talented emerging journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered topics and communities. Launched in 2017 and donor-financed, Report for America is creating a new, sustainable system that provides Americans with the information they need to improve their communities, hold powerful institutions accountable, and rebuild trust in the media. Report for America is an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. GroundTruth is an award-winning nonprofit media organization with an established track record of training and supporting teams of emerging journalists around the world and in the U.S.
