5 Matador Members to Meet Right Now: The Journalists' Edition

1. Francisco Alarcon

Francisco’s hometown is Ciudad Juarez, Mexico… one of the least safe places for journalists on the planet.

He currently lives in El Paso, where he is a journalism student and a reporter for a local Spanish-language newspaper.

2. Alexis Grant

Alexis Grant, a regular Matador contributor, graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, worked as a reporter at the Houston Chronicle for three years before taking a temporary leave from the profession to backpack around Africa.

Her trip gave her plenty of writing material–so much so that she spent the period following her return from the trip writing a memoir about it. Her memoir finished, she’s now looking to pick up where she left off as a journalist. You can read more about her in this interview or on her blog.

3. Conner Gorry

Conner, an American expat who has called Cuba home for just shy of a decade, has written a whole shelf of guide books and other travel-related articles for publications like Cuba Absolutely and others, but her day job is working as the senior editor of the MEDICC Review, “the only peer-reviewed journal in English dedicated to Cuban health and medicine.”

She recently returned from a trip to Haiti, where she reported on Cuban doctors’ work in post-earthquake Port-Au-Prince. Keep up with her on Twitter or her blog.

4. Andrew S. Lewis

Andrew, a recent arrival to the Matador community, describes himself as a travel journalist who “focuses on the coasts of the globe,” filing stories for surfing publications.

His mission? To “help Americans understand that the world is not flat, and that three miles off our coasts the ocean does not, in fact, drain off in some Niagra fashion into the deep of space.”

Friend him up here on Matador and follow his blog.

5. Mei-Ling McNamara

Mei-Ling is a long-time Matador member who lives in London, where she works as a journalist and producer. Much of her work has focused on human rights issues, and she has collaborated with the International Red Cross and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

Community Connection:

Are you considering a career in travel journalism? Read Sarah Stutteville’s article “To Be (or Not to Be) a Travel Journalist” for some first-person insight on the profession.