Paul Thomasch, the U.S. general news editor for Reuters, sent out the following staff announcement on Thursday:
I am pleased to announce the addition of the following correspondents to our U.S. General News reporting team:
Dan Wallis will be based in Denver after more than a decade with Reuters in Africa and Latin America. As deputy bureau chief for the Andean region over the last four years, he covered the turbulent end of the Hugo Chavez era and Venezuela’s latest bout of unrest. A northeast England lad, Dan was deputy foreign editor at PA News, the UK’s equivalent of AP, in his pre-Reuters life. He became our Tanzania correspondent in 2003, living in the back of our small office, above a bar. He was later based in Kampala and roved east Africa, covering Uganda’s war with Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels and conflicts in Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia. While in Kenya in 2009, Dan played a key role in the Nairobi team reporting on a disputed election that triggered months of unrest that left more than 1,000 people dead. He will begin his new assignment in early June.
Fiona Ortiz will be based in Chicago. She has been with Reuters since 1996 on assignments in Guatemala, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Spain. Although born American, she says the Midwest is her most exotic foreign posting yet, having never set foot in the vast region. After running the six-country South Latam region for four years she landed in Madrid in 2010 just in time to celebrate the country’s World Cup victory and lead the bureau through a major world story as Spain flirted with a historic default and threatened to bring down the euro currency union. She usually cites salsa dancing, sailing and bike commuting as pastimes, but the truth is that of late she just swims lots of laps in a community pool. She begins her assignment in early July.
Jonathan Allen will be based in New York starting in July. Jonathan started working for Reuters in the New Delhi bureau in 2006, covering a wide array of issues, from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis to the outsourcing call centers of Bangalore. When riots swept Tibet in 2008, he reported on developments from Dharamsala, the seat of the exiled Tibetan government and the Dalai Lama. Once, for a nearly a week, he was made to stand outside Liz Hurley’s wedding in Rajasthan. He become the general news correspondent in Mumbai in 2008. He has freelanced for the New York Times from the U.K., India and New York and worked as a New York stringer for Reuters since 2011. His feature on the Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng’s tumultuous year at New York University won a New York Press Club award and is a finalist in the national reporting category of this year’s Livingston Awards for Young Journalists.
Jonathan Kaminsky will be based in New Orleans after stringing for Reuters for two years out of Washington state. He has had stints as a statehouse reporter for the Associated Press in Olympia, Washington. Before that, he worked as a reporter for Village Voice Media (now Voice Media Group) in Seattle, Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and was an Associated Press stringer in the tiny western Pacific island nation of Palau. Jonathan was born in upstate New York, grew up primarily in Minneapolis, and spent a few years off and on in Sweden. An undergraduate at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and went to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is married with two young boys. He will begin his new assignment in early June.
Letitia Stein will be based in Tampa starting in June. She has covered news, health, education and politics in Florida for a dozen years. She worked at the Orlando Sentinel before joining the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times). In a decade at the Times, she reported on everything from Gov. Jeb Bush’s education reforms to killer mosquitoes. Most recently, she led an investigation into hospitals that were charging injured patients as much as $33,000 in “trauma response fees” just to get in the door, before delivering any medical treatment. A Tampa native, she realized after graduating from Yale University that news is rarely more interesting than in her home state. She and her husband, photojournalist John Pendygraft, spend their free time chasing after their two-year-old daughter.
Curtis Skinner will be based in San Francisco, returning to his home state after three years of reporting and writing on the East coast. After graduating from the University of California, Riverside, Curtis got his master’s at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. During a year-long health reporting fellowship at The New York World, he was honored as a New York fellow for the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference in 2013. From New York, he moved on to The Philadelphia Inquirer as a Kaiser Family Foundation health reporting intern. Curtis came back to New York as a graduate reporting trainee with Thomson Reuters. He has spent the past 9 months covering stories on an array of beats, including legal, economic markets, legal and of course, general news. He will relocate in September.
Laila Kearney, who started her assignment in May, is based in New York after a year of stringing for the U.S. General News team out of San Francisco, reporting or contributing to hundreds of stories, including the massive Bay Area transit strikes and a devastating wildfire in Yosemite National Park. She previously ran a Patch.com news website in the California city of Hercules, where she wrote about city government scandals and other local issues. Her work for Hercules Patch won the 2012 Society of Professional Journalists’ James Madison Freedom of Information Award and a local press club award. Armed with a degree in journalism from San Francisco State University, the native Californian looks forward to getting a crash course in subway etiquette, learning how to properly pronounce “Houston Street” and tackling other aspects of New York life.
Please welcome them all aboard,
