Ashley Griffin
While attending North Carolina Central University as a Division I athlete, Ashley doubled her workload by serving as editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper. During her reign as editor-in-chief, she uncovered an alleged sexual abuse scandal which led to a 64-felony arrest of a local schoolteacher. Her time spent as editor resulted in the publication winning an unprecedented 26 national awards.
Since then, she has earned her master’s degree in Public Affairs Reporting at the University of Illinois- Springfield. In Springfield, Ashley followed the state of Illinois’ battle to reform its pension system and reconstruct their Medicaid system.
While learning the political ropes, Ashley interacted with lobbyist, congress and landed an interview with Illinois’ Lieutenant Governor. She reported both analytical long form feature stories and daily stories for the public policy magazine Illinois Issues, which sparked her interest in health reporting and lead her to landing the Kaiser Media Internships in Health Reporting this past summer.
As a Kaiser reporting fellow, Ashley pitched and reported ideas for news and feature stories for the Star Tribune, that focused on diverse and immigrant communities and interpreted medical studies to reveal the human impact of research innovations. She also published more than 20 health stories including over a dozen A1 stories during her time at the Star.
While at Berkeley she hopes to make the successful transition from print to television to become a television producer at the network level. To date, Ashley has received the Kaiser Permanente Health Policy Journalism Fellowship, which is the graduate school’s most generous award for any second year student and she will the funds to support her three-part thesis television project that will focus on access to care for patients under the Affordable Care Act.
Ashley is also a show intern for America Tonight, Al Jazeera America’s one-hour new magazine show, which is the flagship program for the network.