A fresh crop of talent is graduating from college journalism programs this time of year, and the Arkansas Times has picked Phillip Powell to be our new environment and agriculture reporter.
Powell will join our editorial team this summer as part of Report for America’s Mississippi River Basin Ag and Water Desk. Report for America is a national program that recruits emerging journalists and places them in newsrooms to cover under-reported topics and communities.
We’re excited to partner with Report for America and thrilled Powell will be joining us. We’ve been remiss in covering Arkansas’s top economic sector and environmental issues as well as we’d like, but we feel confident our new reporter will help us fix that.
We know Powell is going to be swell at it because he’s written for us already! From his current base in Washington, D.C., Powell has helped us keep an eye on Arkansas’s congressional delegation. (Here’s a story he put together in January on SNAP benefits and work requirements.)
A Hendrix graduate now at Northwestern University’s Medill School, Powell seems excited to come back home to Arkansas.
He will be one of nearly 60 reporters and photojournalists taking on new positions in newsrooms across the country this summer in partnership with Report for America. These new corps members join hundreds more corps members in their second or third year with the national service program.
Report for America has now matched more than 650 journalists with local newspapers, public radio stations, digital platforms and television outlets since its launch in 2017. It’s a part of The GroundTruth Project, an award-winning nonprofit dedicated to rebuilding journalism from the ground up.
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and El Dorado News-Times will also welcome new Report for America corps members come July.
