ProPublica Illinois, a Chicago-based regional unit of the nonprofit news organization ProPublica, today announced further additions to its news staff. Mick Dumke is joining as a reporter, Logan Jaffe will become ProPublica Illinois' engagement reporter, and Sandhya Kambhampati will become a data reporter.
"We're very pleased to have recruited such extraordinary journalists to our news team,” said ProPublica Illinois editor-in-chief Louise Kiernan. “Their depth and breadth of experience will allow us to soon get up to full speed and begin publishing investigative stories of moral force.”
Mick Dumke has been on the investigative team at the Chicago Sun-Times since 2015, where he has reported on the police department's secret watch list, the impacts of the state budget crisis on prisoner re-entry, and the dismantling of public housing. For almost a decade before that he was a reporter and editor for the Chicago Reader. His award-winning work there on racial disparities in drug enforcement resulted in lawmakers decriminalizing low-level marijuana possession in Chicago and statewide. Dumke has also previously worked as a reporter and editor for the Chicago Reporter magazine, and a social studies teacher at an alternative high school on Chicago’s South Side.
Logan Jaffe comes to ProPublica Illinois by way of The New York Times and Chicago Public Media. She was the multimedia producer for WBEZ's Curious City, a public-powered journalism project fueled by audience questions about Chicago, and previously worked as an embedded mediamaker with The New York Times' Race/Related newsletter in collaboration with the documentary showcase POV, where she produced an audience-driven, multi-platform project confronting the ubiquity of racism through everyday objects. Jaffe was also a producer with The Times' Daily 360 project, and directed and produced Battle Flag, an independent, interactive documentary which explores the meaning of the Confederate flag in America.
Sandhya Kambhampati was most recently a Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Fellow at Correctiv, an independent, nonprofit newsroom in Berlin. At Correctiv, she worked on a reporting team that published an investigation into the German nursing home system, which won the Deutsche Reporter Preis for Innovation. She also worked on a series of stories on racial profiling throughout Germany, and wrote an e-book on newsroom on-boarding and off-boarding processes. Before moving to Berlin, she was a database reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education, where she reported on college administrative pay and athletics. Her co-reported series on college athletic subsidies won the 2015 Education Writers Association Award for data journalism. Kambhampati also trains data journalists regularly in understanding statistics, freedom of information laws and data analysis.
More information on ProPublica Illinois can be found here.
