Conor Morris

About

Hi there! My name is Conor. I'm the education reporter for Ideastream Public Media, where I regularly produce high-impact radio and digital stories on education news in Northeast Ohio.Prior to that, I had a two-year tenure as a report for America Corps member based in Cleveland with the Northeast Ohio Solutions Journalism Collaborative.During my time there, I helped build up an innovative journalism project with 15+ news partners; reported collaboratively on issues of poverty and inequity in one of the poorest big cities in the country; planned and executed community events and created surveys to guide reporting; and built a blog for students at the second-largest school district in Ohio from the ground up.Before that, I worked at the twice-weekly newspaper The Athens NEWS between May 2014 and April 2020. During that time I won three first-place awards from the Ohio News Media Association for in-depth reporting (in a row), and helped bring the paper dozens of awards each year in our division, including Newspaper of the Year in 2016 and 2018.I can sling public records requests, and know what to look for in mountains of emails and loads of data I get in return. I can tweetstorm with the best of 'em while covering live events, and have been growing my ability to cover events with photography and video. Reporting strengths and topics I've covered in detail include: education, both K-12 and higher education; poverty and inequity; crime and sexual assault on college campuses; public records law (with a history of producing killer stories with these requests, too); protests; city and county government, local politics and government budgets; sustainability and energy policy (fracking, green energy, development); and public infrastructure projects with multi-million dollar budgets (ask me about sewers and utilities, please). Please check out my resume below, and scroll down to check out clips of my work.