Congratulations to AAJA’s 2026 VOICES fellows and editors

Allison Cho, VOICES 2026 Managing Editor, is a business editor at CNN. She edits business, tech and media stories, and helps lead the business team’s evening coverage. Before this, she was a multiplatform editor at The Washington Post, where she edited news and helped produce the print newspaper. She’s currently based in New York but is originally from Chicago.

Russell Leung, VOICES 2026 Deputy Editor, is an associate producer for CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” where he works with guests and produces segments on the top business news of the day. He started at CNBC as a digital rotational program associate, where he worked on consumer news, social media and “Closing Bell: Overtime.“ Russell graduated from Northwestern University in 2024 with a degree in journalism and environmental sciences. He hails from Queens, New York.

Fareeha Rehman, VOICES 2026 Editor, is a news producer at The Seattle Times, where she strategizes to bring stories to a digital audience through SEO analysis, homepage curation and alerts. Before that, she was on MSNBC’s digital editorial team (renamed MSNOW), producing newsletters, writing headlines and collaborating with broadcast teams to break global news online. Her writing has been published across local news outlets in top media markets such as D.C., New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Katrina Pham, VOICES 2026 Editor, is an audience engagement reporter with Borderless Magazine, a nonprofit, nonpartisan immigration newsroom in Chicago. There, she’s bridging the gap between digital audiences and critical news through social media video and community-centered reporting. Her award-winning vertical video work has focused on topics including criminal justice and immigration, and her and her colleagues’ award-winning investigative reporting has revealed inhumane conditions in Chicago’s largest migrant shelter. Katrina has worked for The Marshall Project, ABC 7 Chicago and In These Times, and is currently memberships director for AAJA Chicago and a co-organizer for the Chicago hub of the Video Consortium.

Mythili Sampathkumar, VOICES 2026 Editor, is a freelance journalist based in New York. Her reporting work can be found in The New York Times, L.A. Times, Vox, Teen Vogue, NBC News, Fortune, Forbes, The New Republic, Daily Beast, and more. She was also a staff reporter for The Independent’s New York bureau and former president of SAJA. In recent years, she has written textbooks, edited a photojournalism coffee table book, and managed several newsletters including her own, called Export Quality. She’s also a collage artist in her spare time.