Jackie Crosby, Star Tribune

Jackie Crosby is a business reporter at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, where she writes about the impact that aging baby boomers and rising millennials are having on the economy, health care system and workplace. She has won numerous state, regional and national awards for her work. As a young sports reporter at the Macon Telegraph in Georgia, she co-authored a series on athletics and academics that was awarded the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in specialized reporting. A seventh-generation Floridian, she has somehow figured out how to thrive in frigid Minnesota.

Mark Johnson, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Mark Johnson is a health and science reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He was part of a team that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory reporting for a series of reports on the use of genetic technology to save a 4-year-old boy imperiled by a mysterious disease. In 2003 and 2006, Johnson was part of Journal Sentinel teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer in explanatory reporting; in 2014, he was a finalist for the prize in feature writing in 2014. He previously worked for The Providence Journal in Rhode Island, as well as three other newspapers.

Maria Perez, Naples Daily News

Maria Perez is a minority affairs reporter for the Naples Daily News in southwest Florida. A native of Spain, she earned a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in New York in 2013, and has also covered general assignments at El Nuevo Herald in Miami, the most influential Spanish-speaking newspaper in the hemisphere. Perez is a former arts section reporter at El Mundo in Madrid, the second-largest daily newspaper in Spain.