THE BEAM PHOENIX NEWSROOM
Alice Driver
Investigative Reporter
Alice is a James Beard Award-winning investigative journalist from the Ozark Mountains in Arkansas. She is the author of Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company (One Signal Publishers, 2024). In 2024, the book won the Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. In 2025, Driver participated in The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center Residency, whose former residents include Maya Angelou and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Katie Wilcox
Investigative Reporter & Editor
Katie is an accomplished multimedia investigative journalist and editor who spent six years as an investigative executive producer and reporter at 12News in Phoenix before joining Cronkite’s faculty in Fall 2025. At 12News, she served as a player-coach, leading breaking news coverage while growing audience and producing major accountability investigations. She worked as an investigative data journalist at 9NEWS in Denver and the I-Team at Rocky Mountain PBS. Her work has been recognized with 15 regional Emmy Awards, a National Headliner, the Sigma Delta Chi Award, the 2018 Investigative Reporter & Editor’s Award and 2018 National Edward R. Murrow Award.
Evan Wyloge
Data Journalist & Editor
Evan earned his master’s degree at Cronkite and previously served as an instructor and data editor for the News21 national investigative reporting initiative. He brings deep data reporting experience in Arizona, including at the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting. Evan is drawn to experimentation and civic innovation and has developed public-facing news tools such as the Arizona Dark Money Bot and QuizTheVote. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Center for Public Integrity, and The Guardian US, where his work revealed how Arizona’s 2021 redistricting diluted Native American voting power.
Shelby Grossman
Professor of AI and Investigative Reporting
Shelby joined the Howard Center at ASU in 2025. Most recently she was a Research Scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory and Stanford Cyber Policy Center and co-editor of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety, which she co-founded. Previously she was an assistant professor of political science at the University of Memphis. Her primary research interests are in AI and trust and safety, online child safety, and online political disinformation.
Mitul Balamurugan
Student Worker
Mitul is a graduate student worker with The Beam, where he builds the newsroom’s internal and public-facing AI tools. A master’s student in computer science at ASU (graduating 2027), he specializes in AI systems — particularly LLM agents — and is drawn to applying them to public-interest and investigative work. Before ASU, Mitul worked in a startup founder’s office, where he designed multi-agent AI systems to automate business workflows. He has conducted AI research at Carnegie Mellon University, building models to predict heart disease risk, and earlier contributed to government-funded, brain–computer interface research in India. His hackathon wins include a third-place finish in a Google-sponsored agentic AI track.
Lizzie Tomlin
Investigative Intern
Lizzie is an MA student in the Investigative Program at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In 2024, she graduated from Mississippi State University with a BA in Political Science and Communications and was named Student of the Year. As a staff writer for The Reflector, the MSU school newspaper, she won two SPJ Mark of Excellence awards in 2024, and from SEJC Best of the South contest, she got two 2nd place nods in 2025 and was named a Best News Writer in 2023.
THE BEAM WASHINGTON D.C. BUREAU
Christian Davenport
Columnist
Christian is a nationally prominent journalist who specializes in reporting on the space industry. He is professor of practice at Arizona State University, with joint appointments at ASU’s Cronkite School, the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the Thunderbird School of Global Management. He is an author, a space contributor at CBS News and a former staff writer at The Washington Post, where he covered space for the Financial desk. During a 26-year career at The Post, he was on a team that won a Peabody in 2010 as well as teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize three times. He is the author of three books – most recently, “Rocket Dreams: Musk, Bezos and the Inside Story of the New, Trillion Dollar Space Race” (2025) – and he has produced television documentaries and live broadcasts for the Discovery and Science Channels. Christian has also served as a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a fellow at the Alicia Patterson Foundation.
Todd Gillman
Politics Reporter
Todd is the director of the Cronkite News D.C. bureau and previously served as the Washington Bureau Chief at The Dallas Morning News. Todd is the winner of the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Washington Correspondence. During nine years (three elected terms) on the White House Correspondents’ Association board, spanning three administrations, Todd advocated on behalf of the press corps, negotiated access, and taught and upheld high standards for neutrality and accuracy in the print pool. He is currently the Treasurer for the Society of Professional Journalists Foundation. Todd is a clinical assistant professor at the Cronkite School and has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Angela M. Hill
Investigative Reporter & Producer
Angela joined the Cronkite School in 2024 as the Ida B. Wells Professor of Practice in Investigative Journalism. She is based in Washington, D.C. Her prior work as an investigative journalist and producer for ABC News Network, Scripps News Washington Bureau and as a Senior Video Producer at the Washington Post led to groundbreaking stories, congressional hearings and changes in law. In May 2024, she was part of the Washington Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the investigative series “American Icon.” Angela has received numerous awards for her work, including multiple Emmys and Peabodys, a George Polk, an Edward R. Murrow and the Robert F. Kennedy Grand Prize.
Phineas Hogan
Investigative Fellow
Phineas reports on the intersection of the federal government and the technology industry for The Beam. He graduated from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and the Barrett Honors College at ASU in May 2026 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism. He previously served as an intern for Bloomberg Government covering transportation policy, Phoenix Business Journal covering local business news and is a member of the Dow Jones News Fund Class of 2024, where he wrote for Advertising Speciality Institute. Covering the run up to the 2024 election, his investigation into the CHIPS and Science Act for Cronkite News made national news and spurred the Biden administration to change terms of the subsidy deals before the transfer of power. Phineas also wrote for The State Press, where his reporting earned a finalist nod for a Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award in 2023, and for The Trenton Journal.
Jazzmin Sutherland
Investigative Intern
Jazzmin graduated from Florida A&M University and was recently a multimedia reporting intern with WFSU Public Media. She also served as an MMJ field reporter and news anchor for FAMU-TV 20 News. A staff writer for the FAMU student newspaper, The FAMUAN, Jazzmin also hosted “Beyond the Charts Radio” on WANM 90.5 and was the producer of two original podcasts: “Close Friends Talk Show,” focused on news and entertainment, and “Your Legal Launchpad,” created to bridge the gap between FAMU’s main campus and its College of Law in Orlando. Jazzmin was also a podcast producer for SiriusXM’s Atlas Obscura. This internship is funded by the Scripps Howard Foundation.