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Reporting on Abortion
Noel Lyn Smith (Diné) is a student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She is pursuing a master’s degree in investigative journalism. She has previously reported about the Navajo Nation for the Farmington Daily Times and the Navajo Times. You can follow her work here.
Susan Dunlap covers reproductive justice for New Mexico Political Report. Previously, she covered the largest Superfund complex in the U.S. as the environmental reporter for The Montana Standard. Her beat included the Berkeley Pit, the country’s largest mine waste water damage, and the health impacts of contamination. She received a grant from the Society for Environmental Journalists for a series on the toxic legacy of mining and has won numerous awards. She originally moved to New Mexico in 2011 after leaving an unfinished Ph.D. and New York City behind and got her start as a reporter working for The Sun-News in Silver City. She holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College.
Kim Bojórquez is a Salt Lake City-based reporter for Axios, where she covers everything from Utah politics to religion. Before Axios, Kim worked as a Latino communities reporter on The Sacramento Bee’s Capitol Bureau via Report for America and at The Salt Lake Tribune as a statehouse reporter.
Moderator Megan Kamerick is news director at KUNM radio in Albuquerque. She produced public affairs shows and podcasts on women’s suffrage and cannabis at New Mexico PBS. Megan has freelanced for NPR, Latino USA, Capital & Main, Peace Talks Radio and was a fellow with Solutions Journalism Network. She began her career after grad school at Marquette University with business weeklies in San Antonio, New Orleans and Albuquerque. She’s past president of the Journalism & Women Symposium, and serves on the SPJ-Rio Grande Chapter board. Megan did two TED talks, is a TED coach and a mentor-editor with The OpEd Project.
Immigration reporting strategies: From the border to the heartland
Experienced journalists discuss how they cover immigration stories on the ground at the border and in growing immigrant communities across the U.S., with suggestions and ideas for reporting about immigration in your local community. This panel is presented by the New Mexico Chapter of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Zita Arocha is a bilingual journalist, writer and educator. She is an Emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Texas El Paso, where she taught for two decades and founded the award-winning student reporting website Borderzine.com.
She was the Executive Director of NAHJ in the 1990s, interim ED in 2020, and is currently the president of the New Mexico Chapter of NAHJ. She has reported immigration and Latino issues for The Washington Post, The Miami Herald and two Florida afternoon dailies.
Based in Las Cruces, N.M., her memoir, “Guajira, the Cuba Girl,” will be published in February 2024.
Lauren Villagran covers immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border for the El Paso Times and USA Today network. In her 20-year career as a journalist, she has covered the financial markets in New York, the drug war in Mexico, humanitarian crises at the border and the shifting patterns of migration across the western hemisphere.
Villagran has reported for The Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Albuquerque Journal, Americas Quarterly and others. She is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Human Boundaries
Shaun Griswold is the editor of Source New Mexico. He is a citizen of the Pueblo of Laguna, and his ancestry also includes Jemez and Zuni on the maternal side of his family. He grew up in Albuquerque and Gallup. He brings a decade of print and broadcast news experience. Shaun reports on issues important to Native Americans in urban and tribal communities throughout the state, including education and child welfare.
Vernon B. Abeita is an Isleta Tribal Member with the Pueblo of Isleta and the clerk/administrator for the village of Bosque Farms. Vernon is a former governor for the Pueblo of Isleta, serving from 2021 to 2022. He has an associate’s degree in emergency medical services and is a licensed paramedic. Vernon has been involved in the EMS field since 1995, both in the field and as the director and coordinator of programs for Isleta and Bosque Farms.
Climate: Wildfires and their management
Patrick Lohmann is a reporter for Source New Mexico who has spent 2023 reporting solely on the aftermath of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire, in partnership with ProPublica. He was born and raised in Gallup and previously worked at the New Mexico Daily Lobo, the Albuquerque Journal and the Syracuse Post-Standard.
Megan Gleason is a reporting fellow for Source New Mexico. She started at Source NM in June 2022 through the New Mexico Local News Fund and immediately began reporting on the state’s ongoing disaster season, including the Black Fire and the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire. She previously served as the editor of the Daily Lobo, graduating from the University of New Mexico in May 2022.
Matthew Hurteau is a Professor of Quantitative Ecology in the Department of Biology at the University of New Mexico. His research focus is on understanding how climate change and disturbance alter the distribution of tree species and carbon dynamics across landscapes. He works extensively with land managers and policymakers at the local, state, and federal level to facilitate science informing decision-making.
Climate: Water in a drying land
Water reporters Paskus, Prokop and Runyon will talk about their years spent covering the West’s big rivers — the Colorado, Rio Grande and Gila — in a warming world, as well as where they see both the reporting and the water heading.
Laura Paskus has reported on environmental issues in New Mexico and the U.S. Southwest since 2002, when she began her career at High Country News. She has worked for print, online, radio, and television outlets, covering climate change, forest fires, water challenges, wildlife, and more. She’s the author of the 2020 book, “At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate” and is senior producer of “Our Land: New Mexico’s Environmental Past, Present and Future” on NMPBS.
Danielle Prokop covers the environment and local government in southern New Mexico for Source New Mexico. Her coverage has delved into the climate crisis on the Rio Grande, water litigation and health impacts from pollution. She’s worked for publications in Texas, Nebraska and her home state, New Mexico.
Luke Runyon is a journalist, currently serving as co-director of The Water Desk at the University of Colorado’s Center for Environmental Journalism. Prior to his current position, Luke was a managing editor and reporter for KUNC, the NPR station for northern Colorado. Luke has also reported for Harvest Public Media, Aspen Public Radio and Illinois Public Radio. He currently serves as the president of the board of directors for the Society of Environmental Journalists. He’s a former Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism fellow at the University of Colorado.
How do we assure the future of local news?
Communities need information and journalists are here to serve, but changing business models and disruptive technologies make this a fraught future to forge. Three local news pioneers on the front lines will share the ups, downs and notable successes in creating and sustaining community news in our region.
Dana Coffield is senior editor and co-founder of The Colorado Sun, a digital publication launched five years ago.
A Colorado native who became a journalist to try and satiate an endless appetite for knowledge, Dana has worked as an editor and reporter at a variety of publications along the Front Range ranging in size from the Rocky Mountain News to the weekly Louisville Times.
Most recently she was senior editor for news at The Denver Post, where she helped direct coverage of the Aurora theater shooting that led to the Post’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. Sadly, it was her second shared Pulitzer for a gun massacre. Coffield also did stints at The Associated Press and a couple of trade publications, where she developed a keen understanding of telecommunications infrastructure and organic food.
Dana also is a relatively recent homeowner in extremely southern Hidalgo County, New Mexico, where she is experiencing firsthand the difficulty of navigating community and government in a place that seems to be mostly forgotten by media.
Pat Davis is the owner and president of Ctrl+P Publishing Co., a local newspaper group that owns and publishes weekly papers including the Sandoval Signpost, Corrales Comment, and The Independent (East Mountains and Edgewood) and The Paper, Albuquerque’s alt-weekly and The Rolling Paper, a statewide cannabis publication.
A former police officer, Pat’s first foray into news came in 2014 when he founded the New Mexico Political Report, a nonprofit online publication covering politics statewide. When the pandemic forced the closure of Albuquerque’s nearly 30-year old alt-weekly to close, Davis rallied the staff to start a new paper, The Paper, one of the few papers to start during the pandemic.
In 2022, he acquired three other local titles from retiring publishers. Today Ctrl+P is one of the country’s few LGBT-owned newspaper groups. Pat also serves as an elected Albuquerque city councilor and as a consultant to governments and companies in the cannabis industry.
Mikayla Ortega is the editor of the Questa del Rio News, whose mission is “To Inform, Inspire, Connect and Unite the Communities of Northern Taos County.” Questa Del Rio News is an editorially independent local news source published by the Questa Economic Development Fund.
Ortega was born and raised in Questa. She got her journalism degree from UNM, and worked for KOB4 as a Senior Assignment Editor. In 2017, she took a similar role at the ABC affiliate in Denver.
Ortega has won three Emmy Awards in breaking news, best newscast report in a larger market, and best investigative journalism and storytelling.
In 2021, she served as a communications manager for the Denver Office of Emergency Management, a position she currently holds full-time.
In 2023, Ortega also took on the editorship of the Questa del Rio News.
