This month marks the beginning of another year of our Local News Fellowship program. Pairing recent graduates and inschool journalism students with newsrooms throughout the state, participants receive firsthand, experiential learning and training alongside reporters and editors across New Mexico.
Thanks to successful policy efforts during this past legislative session – and the direct support of Senator Jeff Steinborn of Las Cruces, the Local News Fund received $100,000 in continued funding for this important and rewarding program. Please read on for a full list of this year’s 20242025 class of Local News Fellows and Interns - including new categories of Advanced Fellows and Advanced Internships!
FELLOWS
Kylie Garcia, a 2024 NMSU graduate from Rio Rancho is spending her fellowship at the Santa Fe New Mexican. Kylie will divide her time between the city desk and the paper’s arts magazine, Pasatiempo.
Brody Foster, a 2024 UNM graduate from Albuquerque, is the first New Mexico Local News Fellow placed at Albuquerque Business First. Brody is building on his experience as a Local News Intern at KOB-TV last summer.
Bianca Hoops, a 2024 UNM graduate from Albuquerque, is working as an assistant producer at KRQE-TV. She joins UNM grad Junko Featherston, who was hired fulltime at KRQE after her 2023–2024 fellowship there.
ADVANCED FELLOWSHIPS New this year, we’ve debuted Advanced Fellowships, which allow more experienced earlycareer journalists to advance their skills and provide specialized help to news organizations.
Justine Collister, a 2023 UNM graduate, is spending the next year at KOB-TV with news director Matt Grubs. Passionate about broadcast, Justine interned at KOB as a student and then spent the last year as a fellow at KNME-TV.
Leah Romero is working with Shaun Griswold at Source New Mexico this year, providing vital coverage of southern New Mexico centered on Las Cruces. Because Source is a nonprofit site that allows republishing of its content, Romero’s work will reach audiences statewide. Leah was one of our 2020–2021 fellows at the Las Cruces Sun-News, where she worked until earlier this year.
INTERNS
UNM student Connor Currier is interning this summer at City Desk ABQ, part of CTRL+P Publishing. He’s building on work he did last semester covering the Albuquerque City Council for the New Mexico News Port.
Anh Thu Meis, the first CNM student we’ve worked with, will spend the summer working at the Rio Rancho Observer. They previously served as editor of the Highland High School newspaper.
Micaela DePauli, a UNM student, is working at KNME-TV this summer, working her way around the studio.
Another innovation this year: Advanced Internships. These allow students to build on their skills before graduating.
UNM’s Mia Casas was a Local News Intern last summer at KUNM, and has been working as a student reporter there during the school year. This summer you can hear her hosting All Things Considered in addition to her reporting.
Lauren Lifke, a UNM student, is working at the Santa Fe Reporter this summer. She was a Local News Intern at the Rio Rancho Observer in 2023, then interned at the Albuquerque Journal during the last school year.
Accelerator Focuses on Small, Startup Newsrooms
For the first four years of the Local News Accelerator program, we focused on helping many legacy news publishers: newspapers, community radio and public media. And our state also has the good fortune to have four established statewide nonprofit newsrooms that have participated in the program: New Mexico in Depth, Searchlight New Mexico, New Mexico Political Report and Source New Mexico.
What’s striking about our new cohort of newsrooms in the Accelerator is how many startup newsrooms are participating, with seven out of 17 having launched in the past couple years. Plus, Ctrl+P Publishing is planning to use the Accelerator program to test a new edition of The Independent newspaper for the East Mountains communities.
If we are going to solve the stubborn problem of “news deserts” — communities without trusted sources of news — we will need to help legacy news outlets thrive, while also considering what kinds of startups can fill the gaps. Last year, the Local News Fund launched its first Local News Incubator program with four startups, and three of those are now part of the Accelerator: UpLift Chronicles in Albuquerque’s International District, Get Involved Zuni and Uplands-Uplifting News in Mora.
You might detect a theme: uplifting news is needed more than ever in under-resourced areas where most mainstream news outlets will only cover crime or wildfires. Plus, outside of our Incubator, there have been some other important startups in the state: The Ratonian in Raton, Mountainair Dispatch, Boomtown Los Alamos and the New Mexico Jewish Journal. In each case, communities were missing vital news and information, the glue that helps keep them together.