Meet our new Rio Grande Valley reporter, East Texas reporter and audience producer

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We recently welcomed three journalists to our newsroom. Berenice Garcia, an experienced journalist and McAllen native, is our first-ever reporter based in the Rio Grande Valley, as part of the newest class of Report for America corps members. Jess Huff, who spent five years reporting for the Lufkin Daily News, is reporting from East Texas. Laura Duclos, a savvy audience-first journalist, will help us get our work out through new platforms, in particular short videos that explain the news.

From McAllen, where she reported for The Monitor from 2016 to 2023, Berenice Garcia will report on immigration, trade, agriculture and the Valley’s rich history and culture. She’ll bolster our coverage of Texas’ 1,254-mile border with Mexico. She’ll also play a key role in exploring the rightward shift in the Hispanic vote in South Texas during a critical election year. Berenice is a graduate of New York University, where she studied journalism.

From Lufkin, Jess Huff has written about topics from housing and property taxes to infrastructure and water since she joined us in October. She covers a vast region that extends from Texarkana in the northeast to Beaumont on the Gulf Coast. Jess succeeded our inaugural East Texas reporter, Pooja Salhotra, who has moved to a general assignment role based in Austin. Jess grew up in Utah and holds a journalism degree from Northern Arizona University.

With these two hires, we have completed — for now — the regional reporting team we announced in April 2022. The other reporters on the team are Jayme Lozano Carver in Lubbock, covering the South Plains and Panhandle, and Carlos Nogueras Ramos in Odessa, covering the Permian Basin. Both are supported by Report for America. The team is led by an exceptional editor, Nic Garcia, who is based in Dallas and joined us from the Des Moines Register. This team has helped the Tribune tell a more complete story of this immense, diverse state, and especially its rural areas, which face common challenges such as a shortage of medical specialty care, the loss of young, talented workers to larger cities, aging infrastructure and lack of reliable broadband access. Most recently, the team anchored the Tribune’s coverage of the deadly Panhandle wildfires.

Last but not least, Laura Duclos started on April 15 as our new audience producer, based in Houston. She comes to us from MediaWise, the Poynter Institute’s groundbreaking digital literacy project, where she focused on reaching younger audiences and wrote scripts and directed videos for its TikTok YouTube, and Instagram accounts. Before joining MediaWise, Laura was a multimedia editor at the Houston Chronicle, where she created social videos for all newsroom beats, ranging from explainers about Houston-flavored honey to historical interviews around Juneteenth. Laura is a graduate of Texas Tech University, where she studied journalism, and holds a master’s degree from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY.

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