ProPublica’s Emerging Reporters Program provides support and mentorships to college students who are pursuing careers in investigative journalism and need additional training and financial support to help advance their goals.
Participants receive a $9,000 stipend, a trip to the annual NICAR investigative journalism conference, occasional training and presentations by speakers. They’ll also be paired one-on-one with ProPublica journalists who can help counsel them on stories, build their connections in the industry and expose them to the varied paths that careers in investigative journalism can take. Past Emerging Reporters have gone on to work at The New York Times, The Associated Press, Fresnoland, Capital B, The Tributary and other outlets.
Our goal is to encourage the next generation of journalists who seek to shine a light on abuses of power and produce stories with moral force that provoke change. In choosing the class, we look for students who demonstrate an early dedication to journalism as a career, through internships, work at local news outlets or work at campus publications. And where those opportunities — which are often unpaid — aren’t accessible, we look for other ways the student has shown an eagerness and a drive to learn the craft.
This year’s class of exceptional student journalists are from schools in Illinois, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa and New York.
Meet our 2026 class:
Annisyn Krebs-Carr (she/her)
Annisyn Krebs-Carr is a senior at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign studying journalism and animal sciences. She is a reporter for Illinois Public Media Student Newsroom, where she reports on the ongoing housing crisis in Champaign-Urbana. Previously, she served as the arts and entertainment editor at The Daily Illini, the independent newspaper at the university. She is now the managing editor and oversees content produced by the entire newsroom. In 2026, she interned for St. Louis Public Radio and formed relationships with the investigative reporters at NPR’s Midwest Newsroom. This is where she developed a deeper appreciation for investigative journalism. As she continues her journalism career, she wants to focus on how the criminal justice system has failed, and continues to fail, Black people. She also wants to explore how environmental racism has impacted lower-income communities. After graduation, she hopes to work in a public media newsroom and report on local stories while honing her investigative journalism skills. Long term, Annisyn hopes to build a dedicated career as an investigative journalist in public media.
Jessica Meza (she/her)
Jessica Meza is a senior at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln studying journalism, advertising and public relations. Jessica works across mediums, including in data visualizations, video, print and social media, with an emphasis on audio reporting. Jessica hopes to begin her career in investigative, in-depth reporting, focusing on marginalized communities. She hopes to use her reporting to amplify the voice of people facing hidden injustices in her community. Other interests include housing, immigration and food reporting. Jessica currently works at Nebraska Public Media as a reporting intern. She previously interned at NPR’s Midwest Newsroom and, as the Hortencia Zavala Foundation intern, wrote for The Fulcrum and the Latino News Network. In 2025, she was part of the team at Nebraska News Service that was awarded a regional Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for its investigative project on missing and murdered marginalized women.
Lajward Zahra (she/her)
Lajward Zahra is a senior English major at Rice University in Houston, originally from El Paso, Texas. Her reporting focuses on politics, immigration and the environment, particularly in Texas. She is a 2026 writing fellow at The Nation and has written for the magazine since 2023. She previously interned with the Houston Chronicle editorial board in summer 2025, reporting and writing on local and state politics, including the Texas Republican Party convention, among other issues. Lajward’s freelance work has also appeared in publications including The American Prospect, Teen Vogue, Business Insider, Rewire News Group and Scalawag. She was a 2024 Asian American Journalists Association Voices fellow.
Thai Theodoro (she/her)
Originally from Brazil, Thai Theodoro studies political science with a concentration in Latin American studies at Grinnell College in Iowa. Now in her senior year, she is the managing editor of The Scarlet & Black, Grinnell’s independent student newspaper. Thai has interned at The Boston Globe, the Des Moines Register and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and her reporting has been published in dozens of newspapers across the country. She is a member of the New York Times Corps and a former participant in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Student Project. Thai is passionate about telling untold stories, pursuing investigative reporting with the power to challenge the status quo, using the three languages she speaks to reach underrepresented communities, and, of course, writing the occasional quirky story.
Tsehai Alfred (she/her)
Tsehai Alfred is a senior at Columbia University studying English. She is the 150th editor-in-chief and president of the Columbia Daily Spectator, the campus newspaper, and is also an intern on CNN’s criminal justice team. Over the summer, she was a Dow Jones News Fund intern at VTDigger, an accountability-focused newsroom in Vermont, investigating the troubled integration of AI into healthcare, a struggling dairy farming industry, and soaring police use-of-force payouts. Previously, she has interned at City & State New York, covering the 2025 mayoral race and city council; at PBS News as a Gwen Ifill Journalism Fellow; and at her local news outlet, the Virgin Islands Consortium. Her reporting interests include local government, economic inequality, and political and corporate accountability.
Source: ProPublica · 2026-10-28
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