As The 19th gears up for another year of critical journalism,  we’re staffing up our audience and editorial teams to support our growing coverage. Myrka Moreno and Lance Dixon will join our audience team as audience engagement producers; Megan Kearney joins our editorial team as digital producer; and Jasmine Mithani comes aboard as a data visuals reporter. They’ll begin working with us in January and we could not be more excited.

Moreno comes to us from San Antonio, and was born and raised in a migrant farmworker community in Harlingen, a border city in Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. As a College Assistance Migrant Program (CAMP) scholar, Moreno pursued digital media management and journalism at St. Edward’s University in Austin, where she grew passionate about storytelling and took pride in documenting agricultural worker experiences similar to hers. In recent years, Moreno has worked as a social media editor for the Hilltop Views newspaper; created and implemented social strategy as a digital intern with the Texas Observer; and later moved on to Grist as their social media engagement fellow, where she expanded social strategies, created a metrics dashboard and experimented with creative social distribution before being hired full-time as a social media coordinator. Since then, she’s won the NYU American Journalism Online Award for Best Twitter Thread in 2021 and contributed to the winning package for the ONA 2021 General Excellence in Online Journalism, Small Newsroom for Grist. Follow Myrka on twitter @myrkitty.

Dixon joins us from Miami, where for much of the past decade he’s covered local news in South Florida and his hometown. Dixon earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Morehouse College in Atlanta and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. Early in his career, he was a general assignment and municipal government reporter at the Miami Herald. Later, he worked as director and storytelling producer at The New Tropic, a hyperlocal news outlet that covers South Florida culture, civic engagement and more through a daily newsletter. Most recently he served as digital editor at WLRN News, South Florida’s NPR affiliate. He’s a former Online News Association MJ Bear Fellow and a 2021 participant in the Poynter Institute’s Leadership Academy for Diversity in Media. Follow Lance on twitter @LDixon_3.

Kearney joins us from Delray Beach, Florida. Before The 19th, she spent four years with the USA TODAY Network’s Digital Optimization Team, where she set strategy for the promotion of daily news coverage, enterprise projects and newsletters for 18 local news sites across Florida. Megan graduated from the University of Florida with a journalism degree and has worked in a variety of planning and production roles at Gannett, with an emphasis on refining workflows, optimizing local and statewide journalism and creatively transforming print news into a digital, audience-driven experience. Megan was recognized as a member of Gannett’s Emerging Leaders cohort in 2019 and has served as a media mentor for students and aspiring journalists for nearly three years. Her passions are rooted in teaching and working to earn the trust of the readers and communities she serves. Follow Megan on twitter @MegKear.

Mithani is a journalist focused on making complex ideas accessible to everyone. She has worked as a game developer, civic tech software consultant, alt-weekly editor and user experience designer. Her experience in journalism spans newsrooms national to hyper-local, including National Public Radio and South Side Weekly. She was most recently at FiveThirtyEight, where she worked on interactive forecasts and visual stories about topics such as COVID-19 modeling, the 2020 presidential election, and why people fall for conspiracy theories. Follow Jasmine on twitter @jazzmyth.

As you can see, this is an all-star lineup. Please join us in welcoming our new colleagues to the 19th newsroom.