Case Study: High-Impact Local Reporting

Lisa Chedekel is a senior writer and co-founder of the online news service C-HIT (the Connecticut Health Investigative Team), which has a section devoted to veterans’ issues. She is an award-winning investigative reporter who wrote for the Hartford Courant for 15 years, covering a wide range of beats, from politics to healthcare.

In 1999, she was among a team of journalists awarded the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting. In 2006, Chedekel co-authored a series on mental health in the military that won the Dart Award for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma, the George Polk Award and the Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting; in 2007, she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting.  Before writing for The Courant, she was a staff writer and columnist for the New Haven Register.

Susan Kaplan’s public radio career began at WFCR, now New England Public Radio in western Massachusetts. Her 20-year tenure included hosting "All Things Considered," "Morning Edition", “The Short List” and working as a feature reporter. She also spent a year at WGBH Radio in Boston building and executing a new position as Night Editor.

Kaplan’s radio stories have aired nationally on NPR's "Morning Edition," "All Things Considered," "On the Media," "Only A Game," “Here and Now,” and on PRI's "The World" and "Marketplace." For six years Kaplan hosted "Watercooler," a weekly public affairs program on WGBY Public Television for Western New England. Kaplan has received numerous Associated Press Broadcaster's awards including first-place in 2014 for her feature titled “A Moment with World War II POWs”.

In 2010 Kaplan was a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow, which supported her reporting on women in the military. Since then, Kaplan has continued to report about veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Kelly Kennedy has, since February 2007, been a medical/health reporter for all of Gannett's military papers — Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Times.  Before that, she was a reporter for Army Times.

Kennedy has also written for the Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, NASA, the (Boulder) Daily Camera, the Denver Post, the (Portland) Oregonian, the Salt Lake Tribune, the (Ogden) Standard-Examiner and Readers' Digest. Kennedy holds a graduate degree in journalism from the advanced professional program at the University of Colorado in 2007.  She also taught editing, page design and news writing at the University of Northern Colorado, as well as critical thinking and writing at the University of Colorado. She is at work on her first book: a fictionalized account of her time as a soldier in the first Persian Gulf War.

Jim MacMillan is the program manager for the Center for Public Interest Journalism at Temple University. From 2012 through 2014, he managed the Gun Crisis Reporting Project, a small nonprofit news organization focused on solutions to gun violence in Philadelphia.

Previously, MacMillan produced War News Radio as the Journalist in Residence at Swarthmore College, taught convergence journalism at the University of Missouri, launched video news reporting at the Philadelphia Daily News and photographed the war in Iraq for the Associated Press, for which his team was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. MacMillan studied journalism and trauma as a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow as well as with the Knight-Wallace Fellows at the University of Michigan.