Reuters names NABJ fellows

Reuters named six journalists as the first recipients of a fellowship created in partnership with the National Association of Black Journalists.

The fellowships will be awarded every year to rising reporters, recent graduates or business professionals who demonstrate a commitment to a career in journalism and a passion for multimedia story-telling.

These fellows will be at Reuters for up to nine months. Participants will start with intensive classroom training and then work on reporting teams, and will be mentored by reporters and editors in their bureaus.

Here are the fellows:

Bethel Habte, a reporter and audio producer based in the Washington D.C. metro area, will join the Reuters digital team in New York. She just completed an M.S. in multimedia journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, specializing in business, audio and interactive reporting. Habte is a Texas-born, Virginia-raised, Eritrean-American who’s semi-fluent in Spanish. She has traveled to Eritrea, Ecuador, Peru and Nicaragua, and has worked on and managed news teams starting in high school and into college. In her free time she listens to many podcasts and enjoys to salsa dance.

Clarece Polke will join the Washington bureau at Reuters in February. She is currently an education and night cops reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She has held multimedia reporting and production internships with Scripps-Howard, Gannett and MSNBC. She also reported live from several matches during the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa and spent seven months studying abroad in southern China. A native of Archer, Fla., and a 2013 graduate of Florida A&M University’s School of Journalism and Graphic Communication, Polke is an avid dancer and flag football/yoga enthusiast.

Justin Madden will join the Chicago bureau for Reuters, where he will focus on the agriculture commodities markets. He is currently the digital breaking news reporter at the Lexington Herald-Leader newspaper in Kentucky, covering cops and courts, and everything in between. Madden won a Kentucky Press Association Award for a hotel explosion in 2014 and anchored a team of reporter’s that won a McClatchy President’s Award for their aggressive coverage of the NCAA Championship celebrations that showed fans burning couches, fighting and police shooting rubber bullets. Madden has worked with WKYT-TV, the newspaper’s reporting partner, on stories focused on suicide, heroin and babies born addicted. Justin has interned at Black Entertainment Television (BET), Columbia Broadcasting Systems (CBS) on the hit show ‘Criminal Minds.’ A native of Los Angeles, Madden graduated from Grambling State University, where he served as editor-in-chief for The Gramblinite newspaper, 2012-2013. Justin was also the vice president of print and president of Grambling’s NABJ chapter.

Gina Cherelus is taking on a breaking news post with a social media focus in New York for Reuters. After interning for ELLE magazine and The Miami Herald, Cherelus worked for Forbes Travel Guide in Atlanta. She was born in Fort. Lauderdale, Fla., and spent most of her life growing up in the South Florida area. She relocated to Tallahassee to attend college at Florida A&M University where she received a Bachelor’s of Science in journalism. At FAMU’s School of Journalism & Graphic Communications, she was editor-in-chief of the university’s award-winning magazine, Journey. Throughout her personal and professional career, she’s grown an interest in stories relating to women’s issues, politics, technology, race issues, film and environmental issues.

Makini Brice will continue in the Dakar bureau in Senegal, where she has been an Overseas Press Club fellow with Reuters since the beginning of June, as the recipient of the club’s Flora Lewis Award. She won the prize by submitting a portion of her reporting on children who had migrated to the country alone, primarily from sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. She is also part of a team of journalists who were nominated earlier this year for an Emmy for a story about Senegalese schoolchildren who beg for food and tuition money for certain Koranic schools. Brice has a joint M.A. from New York University in Global Journalism and French Studies, and a B.F.A. from the University of Southern California in Writing for Screen and Television.

Marcus E. Howard will join the Reuters markets desk in New York. He has worked primarily as a government reporter for several years, writing for the Los Angeles Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune and daily newspapers in his home state of Georgia. He has earned two professional awards for his work. He completed a bachelor’s in political science from Boston College and master’s in journalism from Columbia University.