The Fresno Bee adds Report for America reporter to cover poverty, related issues in Valley
The Fresno Bee is adding a reporter to its staff as part of the 2021 Report for America reporting corps.
Melissa Montalvo will cover childhood poverty in the central San Joaquin Valley for The Bee in partnership with CalMatters and its California Divide project, a collaboration involving multiple newsrooms around the state that examines the growing gap between the rich and poor.
She replaces reporter Manuela Tobias, who covered poverty on the California Divide project for more than two years.
Montalvo, a bilingual reporter, covered the food and agriculture industries, Indigenous issues, and Mexican American culture as a freelancer, with bylines in Civil Eats, L.A. Taco, and more.
She was born in Southern California, raised in the Arizona desert, and identifies as a daughter of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
She graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s degree in international relations, minors in business law and French, and with Renaissance scholar and global scholar distinctions. In 2015, she won a Fulbright Award to serve as an English teaching assistant at Mexico’s Universidad Tecnológica de Jalisco in Guadalajara, Mexico. Montalvo is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Montalvo joins Nadia Lopez as Report for America reporters hosted in The Bee’s newsroom.
“I’m absolutely thrilled to bring Melissa on board and to continue The Bee’s participation in CalMatters’ excellent California Divide reporting project,” Bee Executive Editor Joe Kieta said. “Our partnership with CalMatters and the Report for America program will enter its third year in June. It’s a real win for The Bee’s audience and the community at large, which gets better, more in-depth journalism.”
Report for America expands nationwide
Report for America today announced the placements of some 300 journalists for its 2021 reporting corps.
The cohort, which includes a number of corps members returning for a second or third year, will join the staffs of more than 200 local news organizations across 49 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico and Guam.
The corps is diverse — with 135 journalists of color — at 45%, more than double the percentage found in the majority of America’s newsrooms. By better reflecting their communities, Report for America’s partner newsrooms will be better positioned to gain the trust of their audiences amidst the national reckoning on race.
These reporting positions come at a critical moment, when many local newsrooms are closing — leaving a vacuum of trusted, accurate information that is being filled by partisan news sites and online disinformation that threaten our democracy.
“The crisis in our democracy, disinformation and polarization, is in many ways a result of the collapse of local news,” said Steven Waldman, co-founder and president of Report for America. “We have a unique opportunity to reverse this decline by filling newsrooms with talented journalists who not only view journalism as a public service, but who can make trusted connections with the communities they serve.”
Report for America is a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. It is an initiative of The Ground Truth Project, a nonprofit journalism organization.
This story was originally published April 27, 2021 at 5:00 AM.