Charlottesville Tomorrow’s team is growing. We’re excited to welcome reporters Allie Pitchon and La Shawn Pagán and our new data lead, Leela Prasad, to the team.
Allie Pitchon comes to us from The Progress-Index in Petersburg, Virginia, where she received a 2025 Virginia Press Association Award for investigative reporting. She is Charlottesville Tomorrow’s first public institutions reporter. Pitchon is reporting on the community impact of the University of Virginia and other publicly-funded institutions in the area. These are some of the region’s largest employers, healthcare providers and education centers.
Pitchon was a reporting fellow at The New York Times and the Miami Herald, where she and her colleagues won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the 2021 building collapse in Surfside, Florida. She is currently a Report for America corps member, and part of the Open Campus cohort of reporters covering higher education across the country.
La Shawn Pagán joins as our education reporter and covers issues affecting K-12 students and their parents in central Virginia. Pagán brings 15 years of journalism experience to the Charlottesville Tomorrow newsroom. Most recently, she was the economic justice reporter at Mountain State Spotlight in Charleston, West Virginia and the criminal justice reporter at the Chattanooga Times Free Press.
From 2022 to 2024 Pagán won three Tennessee Press Association Awards, including for education reporting. She has also reported for MediaGlobal News at the United Nations, New York Daily News and The Queens Courier/El Correo de Queens. Before becoming a journalist, Pagán worked for seven years in the legal field.
In addition to a growing editorial team, Charlottesville Tomorrow has added a new product and technology position. As our newsroom’s data lead, Leela Prasad is expanding the use of data visualizations in our reporting, creating tools to support the work of our operations and advancement teams and developing new mechanisms to track community impact.
After eight years as a data journalist at The Indian Express in Delhi, India, Prasad transitioned to a career as a data analyst for news organizations. Before becoming the data lead at Charlottesville Tomorrow, he led data projects at News Revenue Hub and Radio Free Asia.
“At Charlottesville Tomorrow, we are always working to bring new resources to our community so that more people can be empowered by access to information and news,” said CEO and Editor-in-Chief Angilee Shah. “We are grateful that our talented new colleagues are here in central Virginia — and hitting the ground running with reporting that is already helping people engage and act.”
Join us in congratulating our three new hires!
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