Five journalists who graduated from the University of Maryland will receive hands-on investigative reporting experience working at major media outlets as the new class of Roy W. Howard Fellows.
It is thanks to The Scripps Howard Foundation, which is funding the yearlong fellowships.
The nonprofit newsrooms hosting the fellows during the program are NPR, Inside Climate News, Wisconsin Watch, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and The Maine Monitor.
The fellowships honor Roy W. Howard, former chairman of the Scripps Howard newspaper chain and a pioneering news reporter whose relentless pursuit of the news took him around the world, spurred innovation and helped lay the groundwork for modern journalism.
The fellowships, which are awarded biannually, are given to graduates of the Howard Centers for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University.
The 2025-26 Roy W. Howard Fellows:
- Aidan Hughes, an investigative data journalist from Westfield, N.J. who is a Fellow at Inside
Climate News, where he reports on Congress and the current administration’s impact on the environment. - Paul Kiefer is a reporter whose work has appeared in the Minnesota Star Tribune and has been credited by The Baltimore Banner and NPR, among other outlets. After receiving a
master’s degree in data journalism from the University of Maryland, Kiefer is interning at The Washington Post this summer before beginning his Roy W. Howard fellowship with Wisconsin Watch in September. - Adriana Navarro, from Charlotte, was a reporter at AccuWeather and later became a part of the Howard Center at the University of Maryland, where she led a team investigating how lobbyists exploit legal loopholes to privately fund congressional travel. She has since interned at The Washington Post and The Baltimore Banner on their respective data desks. Her fellowship is at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, where she covers topics that fall within the intersection of gender, politics and policy.
- Taylor Nichols of Bellingham, Wash., will start her fellowship covering housing at The Maine Monitor in September.
- Caley Fox Shannon joined the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism in 2023 after nearly five years working as a documentary film producer. She begins her fellowship at NPR in July. There, she will report for one year as part of their investigations team.
