The Deadline Club is pleased to announce four winners in its 2025 scholarship competition.
The recipients have demonstrated an extraordinary dedication to covering today’s most pressing issues and upholding the standards of truth and fairness. Each will be presented with a $2,500 scholarship acknowledging their journalistic accomplishments at the 2025 Deadline Club Awards dinner on Thursday, May 15. Click here to learn more.
Leah Mallory
Fordham University, May 2025
Leah Mallory is a multimedia journalist with experience in television, radio, and digital reporting. She has worked at ABC7 and FOX News, producing and booking for live segments, and created audio content for WFUV, Z100, and SiriusXM. As a Digital Equity Local Voices Lab Fellow at the New York Amsterdam News, she reports on systemic inequities and elevates underrepresented voices. Leah will graduate from Fordham University in May 2025 with a degree in Journalism.
Kaitlyn Schwanemann
Columbia Journalism School, 2026
Kaitlyn Schwanemann is an incoming student at Columbia Journalism School. She graduated summa cum laude from Stony Brook University with a double major in journalism and sociology, and served as managing editor of The Stony Brook Press. Her reporting and editing experience includes internships at CNN, NBC News, NerdWallet (through the Dow Jones News Fund), and NBC Miami, where she wrote more than 200 local news stories in a single summer.
Misha Valencia
Columbia Journalism School, 2027
Misha Valencia is an investigative journalist whose work centers on human rights, intimate partner violence, and judicial abuse. Her reporting has appeared in outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, and HuffPost. In 2022, her coverage of international child abductions was recognized as one of the year’s best independent investigations. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School.
Zhenjia Zhang
Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, 2025
Jinger Zhang is a business and economics reporter at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, where she specializes in TV news. Originally from China, she covers how immigration and economic policies impact working-class communities, with a focus on immigrant labor and housing. Her work blends narrative reporting and data, including pieces on construction labor shortages and rising homebuilding costs. She also serves as president of her school’s chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association.
