WHRO Public Media’s newsroom is growing. The organization recently added three new reporters, increasing the news team to 18 journalists.
Investigative reporter Elizabeth McGowan is joining the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO. Elizabeth is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with deep knowledge, experience and sources covering environment and energy in Virginia and across the country.
She has written several freelance projects for VCIJ at WHRO, covering the environmental hazards of highway construction in downtown Norfolk and Richmond, and investigating The Nature Conservancy’s largest and riskiest conservation project in southwest Virginia.
In her free time, she has hiked the entire Appalachian Trail and written a book chronicling her cross-country, solo cycling trip from Oregon to the Chesapeake Bay.
Brian Saunders joins WHRO as a general assignment reporter covering the city of Norfolk.
He is a Norfolk native and says he is excited to return home. Brian has previously worked in the sports department at The Virginian-Pilot, and did some reporting in Philadelphia about a variety of topics. He also launched a podcast Court & Cork featuring discussions about basketball and wine — mostly basketball. Brian is an alum of Old Dominion University and earned a master's degree in journalism from Temple University.
Ashley White joins WHRO News as an education reporter. Ashley covered education at The Acadiana Advocate, part of Louisiana's largest daily newspaper. She covered all levels of education around Lafayette, Louisiana. Ashley started her career in Tallahassee, Florida. She comes from a family of educators and has a journalism degree from the University of Central Florida.
The WHRO newsroom, started in 2021, was a longtime dream of President and CEO Bert Schmidt. With local newspapers and television stations experiencing layoffs and buyouts, he noticed cities and counties across the Commonwealth of Virginia becoming news deserts — communities with limited access to credible and comprehensive news and information. With six television channels, five radio stations, and a multitude of powerful digital platforms, WHRO was poised perfectly to reestablish local journalism in Eastern Virginia.
As a nonprofit newsroom, WHRO News provides free access to news that is focused on public service journalism, emphasizing key local issues for social and civic impact for the public good to help communities, businesses and individuals thrive.
Since the newsroom's founding, WHRO journalists have won a myriad of local and state journalism awards, and their reporting has been picked up and shared by national news organizations.
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