Three COM students tapped for news reporting corps

Three COM students are the newest members of a “reporting corps” inspired by national service models to help revive local journalism across the country.

Mia Khatib, Hannah Schoenbaum and Shannon Sollitt will join a cohort of more than 300 journalists placed with more than 200 local news organizations across across all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and Guam., as part of Report for America, a national service program of the nonprofit news organization, The GroundTruth Project.

Through the program, Khatib (COM’22) is an education equity reporter at The Triangle Tribune, which serves Black communities in Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina. Khatib has covered Middle East politics and policy for The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a magazine based in Washington, D.C. While at COM, she was a reporter, photographer and associate photo editor of the student paper, The Daily Free Press.

Schoenbaum (COM’20) covers government and politics for the Associated Press, with a focus on the North Carolina General Assembly and the state’s congressional races. Schoenbaum previously covered Congress for The Hill, a political news site, and the Albany Times Union while a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and was a regular contributor at USA Today. At COM as an undergrad, she launched her start in state government reporting as the Massachusetts Statehouse reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Sollitt (COM’21) covers agricultural labor in Salem, Oregon, for the Statesman Journal. A multimedia journalist, Sollitt’s career started in her hometown of Jackson, Wyoming, reporting breaking news, local politics, housing and economic injustice for various news outlets. Sollitt holds a MS in journalism from Boston University.

To counter shrinking newsrooms and tight budgets, Report for America pays half of a corps member’s salary, with the local news organization and local funders together contributing the other half.

Shaun Robinson, Lexi Peery, K. Sophie Will, Sophia Eppolito, Shivani Patel, Eve Zuckoff and Kayla Canne are Boston University graduates who are members of previous Report for America cohorts.