Vanessa Romo
Vanessa Romo is a reporter for NPR's News Desk. She covers breaking news on a wide range of topics, weighing in daily on everything from immigration and the treatment of migrant children, to a war-crimes trial where a witness claimed he was the actual killer, to an alleged sex cult. She has also covered the occasional cat-clinging-to-the-hood-of-a-car story.
Before her stint on the News Desk, Romo spent the early months of the Trump Administration on the Washington Desk covering stories about culture and politics – the voting habits of the post-millennial generation, the rise of Maxine Waters as a septuagenarian pop culture icon and DACA quinceañeras as Trump protests.
In 2016, she was at the core of the team that launched and produced The New York Times' first political podcast, The Run-Up with Michael Barbaro. Prior to that, Romo was a Spencer Education Fellow at Columbia University's School of Journalism where she began working on a radio documentary about a pilot program in Los Angeles teaching black and Latino students to code switch.
Romo has also traveled extensively through the Member station world in California and Washington. As the education reporter at Southern California Public Radio, she covered the region's K-12 school districts and higher education institutions and won the Education Writers Association first place award as well as a Regional Edward R. Murrow for Hard News Reporting.
Before that, she covered business and labor for Member station KNKX, keeping an eye on global companies including Amazon, Boeing, Starbucks and Microsoft.
A Los Angeles native, she is a graduate of Loyola Marymount University, where she received a degree in history. She also earned a master's degree in Journalism from NYU. She loves all things camaron-based.
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The former Minnesota police officer mistakenly drew her firearm instead of her Taser when she fatally shot the 20-year-old Black man during a traffic stop in April.
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A small box was found in the pedestal that used to hold a statue of the Confederate general in Richmond, Va. It took hours for experts to open the box and find several water-damaged items inside.
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The state attorney general said the reforms, including additional training, search warrant tracking and other safety measures could serve as "a national model."
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The agency implemented experts' advice because of a rare and sometimes fatal blood-clotting problem known as TTS. More than 16 million people in the U.S. have received a shot of the J&J vaccine.
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Severe thunderstorms and winds up to 70 mph have caused massive power outages across Kansas and shut down the Kansas City International Airport.
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Lawmakers vote on the payout on Wednesday, years after the "horrific video" of Anjanette Young triggered a slew of policy changes in the way the police department conducts search warrants.
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The Joint Commission on Public Ethics says the disgraced former governor violated the terms of its conditional approval to write the book and it wants him give to the state the money.
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The magazine says it gives the title to the person who had the greatest influence for the past year. Musk, the richest person on Earth, is the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.
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Jurors convicted the Empire actor on five of the six felony disorderly conduct charges he faced. The verdict was announced days after Smollett testified that "there was no hoax."
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The company says its "network device issues" are resolved. Earlier, users were blocked from sites or apps connected to Amazon Web Services, including NPR, Netflix, Venmo and Disney+.