I love Los Angeles. Peel back the Hollywood veneer and, at its core, it’s a city that belives in putting in the work.

Which is why I’m excited to be in LA this week with our 2015 cohort of Knight-Mozilla Fellows to start the work of the fellowship year. With a distributed fellowship like ours, where fellows will spend far more time apart than together, it’s important to start the experience building the pathways of collaboration, community, and sharing that we want our fellows to continue to utilize throughout their fellowship year. It’s also an opportunity to meet somewhere warm and to celebrate the start of an amazing year.

We’re not just celebrating the start of the fellowship year at this onboarding, we’re also welcoming our final fellow for 2015: Kavya Sukumar, who will be spending her fellowship year at Vox Media.

Kavya is a developer-journalist who appreciates both elegant code and well-written prose. Everything about journalism fascinates her and she wants in on it all. She has reported and written stories, analyzed data and built a CMS. She has more than eight years of experience working at technology companies as well as in newsrooms. Kavya was a software engineer at Microsoft when the journalism bug bit her. She has a graduate degree from Medill School of Journalism where she was a Knight Scholar. She is currently a Data & Interactives Editor with the The Palm Beach Post’s investigative team.

We’re thrilled to have Kavya join the already-amazing cohort of 2015 Knight-Mozilla Fellows, and excited to have all of them together with us in LA this week. There’s so much more to come in 2015 from OpenNews, and it feels great to kick off an incredible year with these incredible people.