Economic impacts of the coronavirus crisis

KERA / The Texas Newsroom

NPR and Texas public radio stations collaborated to form the Texas News Hub. It’s the first step in a systemwide collaborative project to create a nationwide virtual public radio newsroom of 1,000-plus journalists. The collaboration includes two daily, hour-long statewide programs (Texas Standard and Think) and will soon include six daily statewide newscasts, and a statewide digital news desk. The Hub is working to hire and train freelance and small station reporters to provide news service to underserved communities in the state’s news deserts.

Alejandra Martinez

Alejandra Martinez reports for KERA in Dallas as well as The Texas Newsroom, a journalism collaboration among the public radio stations of Texas and NPR, where she covers the impact of Covid-19 and its associated economic fallout on marginalized communities. Before joining Report for America, Martinez was a producer at WLRN, South Florida's NPR station where she covered immigration, marginalized communities, and the local arts scene. She would book, write, and produce stories for and the station’s daily talk show, “Sundial,” and she was part of Public Radio International’s (PRI) “Every 30 Seconds” election project, a collaborative public media reporting project tracing the young Latino electorate leading up to the 2020 presidential election and beyond. A native Texan, Martinez began her broadcast career working with KUT, Austin’s NPR station, first as an intern and later a producer. In Texas, Martinez participated in NPR’s Next-Generation Radio project, a week-long journalism boot camp, where she covered Houston’s recovery post-Hurricane Harvey in 2018. She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism in 2017.  

Sophie Kasakove

Sophie Kasakove covers the economic impacts of the coronavirus crisis for The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. She has reported on the environment, big industry and development as a freelance reporter in New Orleans, writing for publications such as The Nation, VICE, The New Republic, and The Lens, a local investigative non-profit. Her recent reporting has focused on climate migration and adaptation and the intersections of the climate and housing crises. Previously, she was a contributing writer at Pacific Standard, where she covered housing issues, a research and reporting fellow at The New Republic, and an intern at The Nation. She graduated from Brown University in 2017, where she was managing editor of the school’s weekly paper. She grew up in Brooklyn, New York.