U.S. JSK Journalism Fellows named for 2016-17

Dustin Bleizeffer — Casper, Wyoming
reporter, WyoFile
JSK Journalism Fellow

Dustin Bleizeffer has helped build WyoFile.com, an online nonprofit news startup into one of the leading journalistic outlets in Wyoming. As editor-in-chief since 2010, he has shaped content strategy and worked closely with the board to seek financial viability for WyoFile. He previously was the energy reporter at the Casper Star-Tribune, covering all aspects of one of the state’s leading industries. He began his journalism career at the Gillette News Record, where he wore multiple reporting and editing hats. Bleizeffer was born and raised in Gillette, Wyo., the son of a coal miner and a custodian. Before earning his journalism degree from the University of Wyoming, he worked as a mechanic’s helper and apprentice for a company that builds and services mining and oil field equipment. Dustin and his wife Kristy have two sons and live in Casper, Wyo. He enjoys fishing.

Heather Bryant — San Francisco, California
director, Project Facet
JSK Journalism Fellow

Heather Bryant came to journalism through her interest in wildlife biology and her love of writing. And while working her way through a journalism degree, she fell in love with technology and its potential for reporting and distributing news. She is director of Project Facet, which received a Knight Prototype Grant in 2015 to develop open source software that simplifies the editorial process for multiplatform publishers. Bryant is particularly interested in helping smaller news organizations collaborate and share content. She previously was digital services editor at KTOO Public Media in Juneau, Alaska, where she led a team building and managing the websites for a statewide television service and three radio stations. Her experiences at KTOO sparked her interest in improving editorial processes and ultimately led her to begin Project Facet.

Veronica Chambers — Hoboken, New Jersey
journalist and author
JSK Journalism Fellow

Veronica Chambers is a prolific author and journalist, best known for her critically acclaimed memoir Mama’s Girl and The New York Times Bestseller Yes Chef, which was co-authored with chef Marcus Samuelsson. She has taught creative writing and worked as a writing coach for Senator Cory Booker on his nonfiction debut, United. She is the editor of the upcoming anthology, The Meaning of Michelle: 15 Writers on the Iconic First Lady and How Her Journey Inspires Our Own. Chambers has held numerous leadership positions at magazines. She was a culture writer at Newsweek, a story editor at The New York Times Magazine and as a director of brand development at Hearst magazines.  She was also the founding editor of Condé Nast’s Glam Latina. Born in Panama and raised in Brooklyn, much of her work is rooted in her Afro-Latina heritage. In 2017, she will publish The Go-Between, a young adult novel.  Her husband Jason Clampet is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Skift.com. Veronica and Jason have a 9-year-old daughter.

Brian Edwards-Tiekert — Berkeley, California
host and producer, UpFront, KPFA Radio
JSK Journalism Fellow

Brian Edwards-Tiekert is the host and founder of UpFront, the morning drive-time public affairs program on KPFA in Berkeley, California. He started his work in media helping to set up the Independent Media Center in Chiapas, Mexico, where he also did human rights work. For two years, he ran a nationwide support program for progressive publications at colleges and universities. He started at KPFA as a beat reporter covering environmental issues, including special assignments covering the 2005 hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, construction of a massive dam in Panama, and UN climate summits in Copenhagen, Cancun, and Durban. In 2006 and 2008, he produced the Pacifica network’s nationwide coverage of elections and political conventions. At KPFA, he also established a long-form journalism training program; outside the station, he’s taught workshops everywhere from the UC Berkeley Labor Center to San Quentin Prison.

Adriana Garcia — New Orleans, Louisiana
managing editor, print, The Times-Picayune
JSK Journalism Fellow

Adriana García, the oldest child of Mexican immigrants, was the first in her family to attend college — entering Arizona State University as a chemistry and biology major with her sights set on medical school. But everything changed when she got a part-time job at the student newspaper to help pay expenses. As a layout artist, she became enthralled with visual storytelling — though she didn’t yet think of herself as a journalist. García switched to major in graphic design and ended up with an internship at The Washington Post, where she started to discover that she had been doing journalism all along. After the Post, she went to work at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. Over the years, she’s developed a deep love for the city and the newspaper, and steadily moved into bigger newsroom roles. When the Times-Picayune’s owner, Advance, shifted focus to online news and reduced print publication to three days a week, García was named design director and charged with rethinking all aspects of the newspaper. In 2015, she was named design and operations manager of the parent company’s southeast print division, overseeing production of Advance’s newspapers in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Garcia and her husband, Drew Reinhard, have a two-year-old daughter.

Clara Gonzalez Sueyro — Oakland, California
director of user experience, Radio Ambulante
JSK Journalism Fellow

Clara Gonzalez Sueyro is a user-experience researcher, anthropologist and entrepreneur who is now applying her background in consumer products to news. Since 2015, she has been director of user experience at Radio Ambulante, a Spanish-language radio program and podcast that tells Latin American stories from anywhere Spanish is spoken, including the United States. Gonzalez Sueyro received a degree in social anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires and after graduation joined Unilever’s consumer research team, where she used ethnographic methods to understand haircare product customers. She quit after two years to seek greater meaning in her work. She found it through project to help foster youth transition to independent adulthood. Her team and foster care participants developed an online guide and support community that continues to grow today. Gonzalez Sueyro then co-founded Chef Surfing, a mobile marketplace startup aiming to connect professional chefs with catering gigs. In 2014, she was Code for America fellow, working with the Puerto Rican government to address economic development challenges. She led a team to launch PrimerPeso.org, an app to help people apply for business incentives. In 2013 she moved to Oakland, California where she lives with her husband Eric Knudtson and infant daughter Elena.

Stacy-Marie Ishmael — New York, New York
managing editor for mobile, BuzzFeed News
JSK Journalism Fellow

Over the past decade, Stacy-Marie Ishmael has worked at the intersection of technology and media. As BuzzFeed News’ managing editor for mobile, she led the development and launch of the BuzzFeed News apps and is responsible for developing best practices for news on mobile across platforms. Ishmael, who was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, came to her love of technology as a child, when her parents gave her a computer and supported her curiosity about hardware and software. At a young age, she was setting up Linux boxes, drawing on her ability to reach out virtually to like-minded peers around the world for advice. While earning her undergraduate degree at the London School of Economics, she discovered the power of journalism when she took over the student radio station and worked part-time for a magazine publisher. Ismael began her career as a graduate trainee at the Financial Times (FT) and went on to be a founding member of FT’s award-winning Alphaville blog, contributing as a reporter (and later, New York bureau chief) as well as its product manager and social media strategist. She next was co-founder and editor of FT Tilt, a startup online news service focused on coverage of emerging markets. Before joining BuzzFeed in 2014, she was FT’s first vice president for communities, creating and leading strategies to grow reader engagement.

Julie Makinen — Los Angeles, California
Beijing bureau chief, Los Angeles Times
JSK Journalism Fellow

Julie Makinen’s eclectic journalism career has taken her around the world and through various roles, from metro reporter at The Washington Post to film editor at The Los Angeles Times to foreign correspondent and bureau chief. She’s seen bombs go off in Iraq, trained journalists in Afghanistan, investigated the demographics of Academy Awards’ judges, chronicled democracy protests in Hong Kong and the plight of earthquake victims in Nepal. But Makinen is most proud of the journalistic collaborations she’s helped create. In 2004, for instance, as a mentor with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, she was part of a team of Western journalists who hired and trained Afghans to create Pajhwok, a news agency in that country. She is on the board of the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, and is chair of its Media Freedoms Committee, which tracks and publicizes Chinese government efforts to restrict coverage of certain topics by threatening, harassing and intimidating foreign journalists. Her hobbies include playing the harp and making ice cream.

Ryan Nakashima — Los Angeles, California
business writer, The Associated Press
JSK Journalism Fellow

Ryan Nakashima is the media and technology business reporter for The Associated Press, writing about how companies and creators are adapting in the digital age. He began his AP career in bureaus in Milwaukee and Las Vegas and has written business stories on a range of topics, from beer and motorcycles to casinos and tourism. Nakashima, the son of Japanese-Americans, was raised in Canada. After graduating from journalism school in Ottawa, he worked as a journalist in Canada for a couple of years, before moving to Japan to explore his roots. He spent a year teaching English, learned Japanese and then worked as a reporter in the Agence France-Presse bureau in Tokyo. His hobbies include playing guitar and brewing beer, but these days he doesn’t have much leisure time — he and his wife, Komaki Matsui, a filmmaker, have 2-year-old triplets.

Katherine Ann Rowlands — San Jose, California
deputy business editor, Bay Area News Group
JSK Journalism Fellow

Born and raised in Berkeley, California, Katherine Rowlands fell in love with journalism in high school. That passion propelled her into reporting and editing jobs in the U.S. and abroad and has sustained her through the disruptive changes of the past decade. Most recently, she’s been deputy business editor of the Bay Area News Group, overseeing daily coverage by a business staff that covers the entire Bay Area for BANG’s news properties, including the San Jose Mercury News and the East Bay Times. During her career, Rowlands has worked in newsrooms in several California cities, including San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Oakland, Contra Costa and San Jose. She spent four years in Honduras, working as a freelancer for The Economist and other publications. She studied at the London School of Economics, while also working as a production assistant for ABC. She has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Rowlands loves to travel and to cook for family and friends in her Oakland home.

Gabriel Spitzer — Seattle, Washington
assistant news director, KPLU
JSK Journalism Fellow

Gabriel Spitzer grew up in Canton, Ohio, the son of a Reform Jewish rabbi who encouraged him to question and passed on a faith in the power of stories. Spitzer found his way into journalism writing for an online magazine, an experience that whetted his appetite and propelled him to journalism graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley to learn radio reporting. He got his first job at the Alaska Public Radio Network, where he covered everything from politics to sled dog races, and began to understand the impact of local reporting. Next, he joined WBEZ in Chicago as a science reporter. While there, he developed a digital-first audio experiment, “Clever Apes,” about the city’s rich scientific community. Distributed as a podcast and aired during the station’s most popular times of day, it won a Kavli Science Journalism Award from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science. In 2012, Spitzer move to Seattle to work for KPLU, where he most recently hosted and coproduced “Sound Effect,” a weekly program of longer-form interviews with people of the region, organized around a theme. Spitzer and his wife, Ashley Gross, a radio reporter, have two young sons.

Elodie Mailliet Storm — New York, New York
senior director, partnerships and business development, Getty Images
JSK Journalism Fellow

Elodie Mailliet Storm manages Getty Images’ relationships with more than 300 editorial and creative content partners around the world, including National Geographic, Sky News, Bloomberg and Condé Nast. In recent years, she’s led the way in initiating new types of partnerships with crowdsourced platforms such as Instagram. Storm also launched Getty Images’ high-end portraiture and fashion division, Contour, which she led until 2014. Before joining Getty, she was director of photography for portraiture and entertainment at Corbis. Storm is on the board of the Emmy award-winning, multimedia documentary production company MediaStorm. In 2005, she was named one of the top 11 people in photography by American Photo. Storm has worked as a freelance writer for Le Nouvel Observateur, VSD, and French Photo. A native of Paris, she came to the United States in 1999 to pursue a master’s degree at Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., with her husband, Brian, and their two young children.