• by Tony Silber , July 4, 2022

Yahoo’s Multimedia Journalism Fellowship is returning after a successful inaugural year in 2021, the company announced last week. 

The program offers opportunities and professional development to up-and-coming journalists from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ), and Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) member pools — with the aim of ultimately bringing more diversity into newsrooms.

Diversity in media is essential, Yahoo noted in a statement. This fellowship provides pivotal mentorship and development, and one-of-a-kind exposure to Yahoo’s almost 900 million monthly active users. Last year’s cohort wrote for Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Life and Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance. Now they’re all on-staff reporters today, continuing to tell stories that make an impact and through their unique lens.

This year, fellows will be writing for Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance and TechCrunch (respectively). They include: 

• Jayla Whitfield — NABJ Yahoo News Fellow.Whitfield joins Yahoo News as a former White House producer at theGrio. Previously, she worked as a multimedia reporter for the Fox News Channel, based in Atlanta.
• Rebecca Chen — AAJA Yahoo Finance Fellow.Chen is a former Big Four Investment-Fund CPA turned financial journalist. She co-founded a personal finance blog and podcast targeted at young investors, and is passionate about financial reporting and storytelling. She joins Yahoo most recently from Hollywood First Look.
• Andrew Mendez — NAHJ TechCrunch Fellow.Méndez a bilingual (English/Spanish) reporter who previously worked in business reporting at The Los Angeles Times. His areas of focus were business, unemployment, development, consumerism and tech in the Southern California a