The Ag & Water Desk is thrilled to announce that six new reporters and local newsrooms will be joining our team.
The Desk partners with newsrooms across the Mississippi River Basin to produce our coverage, and these outlets hire reporting fellows in partnership with Report for America.
The newsrooms joining the Desk this summer include: WXPR in Rhinelander, Wisconsin; KAXE in northern Minnesota; MinnPost in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Nine PBS in St. Louis, Missouri; and Verite in New Orleans, Louisiana. We’ll also have a new reporter join an existing partner, Arkansas Times. This will be the third RFA cohort to join the Desk.
“One of our goals at the Desk is to build the next generation of ag and environment reporters,” said Sara Shipley Hiles, the Desk’s executive director. “These reporters bring considerable training and experience to the job, and I know they’ll help us reach more people with stories that inspire connection, hope, and action.”
The new reporters will contribute environmental coverage to their local newsrooms while also producing regional Desk stories on agriculture and the environment. We’re excited to expand our reach in the upper basin and add another strong outlet at the terminus of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, where so much of the basin’s story takes shape.
Editorial director Chas Sisk said, “I’m especially excited by the breadth of the organizations included in this cohort: from small public radio stations in the Upper Basin, to nonprofit news organizations in the Lower Basin, to the nation’s most-watched public television station in between. The reporters joining us are going to thrive in these environments. They’re going to teach us a lot. They’re going to raise the game of the Desk. And together we’re going to do a lot of good work.”
The journalists will start in July. We look forward to sharing their stories. In the meantime, you can get to know them below.
Claire Carlson – MinnPost
Before joining MinnPost to cover drinking water in Minnesota, Claire Carlson was a reporter for the Daily Yonder, where she spent four years reporting on the nexus of climate change, food systems, and rural communities. She also worked as a freelance journalist for Civil Eats, Offrange, FoodPrint, Minnesota Reformer, Sierra Nevada Ally, and other regional and national publications. She holds a master’s degree in environmental studies from the University of Montana and a bachelor’s degree in international affairs from the University of Nevada-Reno.
Elizabeth Cline – Arkansas Times
Elizabeth L. Cline has covered sustainability, labor, and global supply chains as an independent journalist for publications including The Atlantic, Vogue Business, Slate, and Forbes. Her freelance reporting for the Arkansas Times has explored subjects ranging from the Vietnamese food scene in Fort Smith and snake mating habits to Sen. Tom Cotton’s role in undermining diplomacy and paving the way for military confrontation with Iran. Her 2012 book Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, was an early investigation into the environmental and labor impacts of the global apparel industry and helped spark broader public conversations around fast fashion and ethical consumption. She holds a master’s degree in Global Studies and International Relations from Northeastern University. After spending two decades in New York City, Cline now lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she enjoys kayaking, birding, and hiking.
Cheree Franco – Verite
Cheree Franco is an award-winning print and photojournalist. She has profiled both a U.S. Senator and the founder of OkCupid, covered South by Southwest and Sundance festivals, reported for three months from the Dakota Access Pipeline protest camps, and followed the grassroots caretakers at New Orleans’ Lincoln Beach, a segregation-era Black beach that has been officially closed since 1964 but never abandoned by users. In Arkansas, she investigated a 20-year-old murder conviction, highlighting procedural errors and details that juries never heard. Her coverage ultimately helped the Innocence Project secure a woman’s release from a life sentence without parole. She has reported from New York, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Pakistan, with work appearing in newspapers on two continents, as well as in VICE, Huck, Places Journal and elsewhere. Most recently, she taught journalism at Tulane University.
Rose LaForest – Nine PBS
Prior to this role, Rose LaForest produced video explainers for WSLS-TV in Roanoke, Virginia, as part of an experimental program testing storytelling strategies for video journalists in local newsrooms. There, she covered a range of topics from reproductive freedom to local concerns over data center development. In 2024, she earned her master’s degree in broadcast and video journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. LaForest previously interned at Detroit PBS, producing stories and coordinating digital content. She discovered journalism while studying TV and film production at Michigan State University and says it helped her find a natural way to become involved and contribute to her community.
Stella Mayerhoff – KAXE/KBXE
Stella Mayerhoff, a scientist-turned-journalist, aims to tell environmental science stories that impact local communities. Mayerhoff has written for Mongabay, Eos, the San Jose Mercury News, the Monterey Herald, Georgia State University Research Magazine and Stanford University’s Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. She was a Taylor/Blakeslee Fellow through the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and earned a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also holds a master’s degree in psychology from Georgia State University and a bachelor’s degree in psychology and anthropology from the University of Wisconsin. She’s a regional finalist for the Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award in Science/Environment Reporting. Mayerhoff enjoys spending time with her cat, TBD, who owes his perfectly odd name to a moment of writer’s block.
Maria Peralta-Arellano – WXPR
Maria Peralta-Arellano previously reported in Milwaukee as the Eric Von Fellow for WUWM, Milwaukee’s NPR station. Her reporting at WUWM included stories on the environment, immigration, and arts and culture, with a focus on amplifying underrepresented voices. Her career is shaped by her experiences working with local and independent news organizations, freelancing for a bilingual newspaper, El Conquistador, and covering community needs. She studied at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, graduating in 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in multimedia journalism. She also minored in political science and earned a certificate in Latin American and Caribbean studies.
Desk journalists have contributed more than 3,000 local stories in and about their communities, plus more than 230 collaborative stories that have been published in hundreds of news outlets, from small rural newspapers and radio stations to national media such as Grist and NPR. The Desk’s journalism has been honored by Covering Climate Now, the Society of Environmental Journalists, North American Agricultural Journalists, the Association of LGBTQ+ Journalists, the Institute for Nonprofit News and the Center for Collaborative Media.
Founded in 2021, the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk is an independent reporting network based at the Missouri School of Journalism, in partnership with Report for America and the Society of Environmental Journalists, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation. The mission of the Ag & Water Desk is to enhance the quantity, quality and impact of journalism on agriculture, water and related issues throughout the nation’s largest watershed.
Report for America recruits, places and supports talented journalists in local newsrooms across the United States. We provide salary support, training, and newsroom sustainability coaching, enabling our partners to expand coverage on critical, often overlooked issues and strengthen trust with their audiences. Report for America’s journalist-first model offers a practical, hopeful solution to rebuilding local news — one community at a time. Report for America is an initiative of Report Local, a nonprofit journalism organization dedicated to strengthening local journalism across the U.S. and around the world.
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