By cohort
2017 Cohort: Philadelpha 2018 Cohort: Houston 2019 Cohort: Atlanta 2021 Cohort: Virtual 2022 Cohort: Los Angeles 2023 Cohort: Washington, D.C. 2024 Cohort: Austin 2025 Cohort: Seattle 2026 Cohort: Minneapolis
CNN
Allison Cho is a business editor at CNN. She edits business, tech and media stories, and helps lead the business team’s evening coverage. Before this, she was a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post, where she edited news and helped produce the print newspaper. She’s currently based in New York but is originally from Chicago.
Newsday
Russell Leung is a copy editor for Newsday in Melville, New York, where he edits stories and puts together the print paper for Long Island’s top news source. He most recently worked as an associate producer for CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” where he built TV segments on the top business news of the day. He started at CNBC as a digital rotational program associate, working on consumer news, social media and “Closing Bell: Overtime.“ Russell graduated from Northwestern University in 2024 with a degree in journalism and environmental sciences. He hails from Queens, New York.
Freelance Journalist
Mythili Sampathkumar is a freelance journalist based in New York. Her reporting work can be found in The New York Times, L.A. Times, Vox, Teen Vogue, NBC News, Fortune, Forbes, The New Republic, Daily Beast, and more. She was also a staff reporter for The Independent’s New York bureau and former president of SAJA. In recent years, she has written textbooks, edited a photojournalism coffee table book, and managed several newsletters including her own, called Export Quality. She’s also a collage artist in her spare time.
The Seattle Times
Fareeha Rehman is a news producer at The Seattle Times, where she strategizes to bring stories to a digital audience through SEO analysis, homepage curation and alerts. Before that, she was on MSNBC’s digital editorial team (renamed MSNOW), producing newsletters, writing headlines and collaborating with broadcast teams to break global news online. Her writing has been published across local news outlets in top media markets such as D.C., New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Chicago Reader
Katrina Pham is an award-winning multimedia storyteller passionate about meeting audiences where they are. Her engagement work has reached hundreds of thousands of people across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, and she uses a variety of vertical video formats, from in-the-field dispatches to at-home skits, to make news more accessible. She is currently the social media and content manager for the Chicago Reader and has previously worked with Borderless Magazine, The Marshall Project, In These Times, ABC7 Chicago and The Yappie. She is also a co-organizer for the Chicago hub of the Video Consortium and memberships director for the Chicago chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association.
Harvard Extension School
Barnard College
Yale University
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
University of California, Irvine | AAJA-Los Angeles fellow
UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism
Northwestern University
University of California, Davis
New York University
University of Michigan
University of Southern California | AAJA-Los Angeles fellow
Princeton University
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The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) is a membership nonprofit advancing diversity in newsrooms and ensuring fair and accurate coverage of communities of color. AAJA has more than 1,500 members across the United States and Asia.
