Madeline Fox (1994-) Papers, 2014-2019

Madeline Fox, BSJ ’17, was born September 28th, 1994, in Mountain View, California, but grew up in Portland, Oregon after her family moved in 1995. She has an older brother, Ryan, who is a Yellowstone park ranger. Madeline grew up reading The Oregonian – first the comics pages, then, eventually, the articles. Oregon Public Broadcasting, the local NPR member station, was always on in the background at home. She attended Raleigh Park Elementary School, then St. Thomas More Catholic School. She graduated from Jesuit High School in Portland with honors in 2013, enrolling at Northwestern University the following fall with a double major in journalism and international studies. She was heavily involved with The Daily Northwestern, serving as campus editor in Winter Quarter 2016, and launched a short-lived podcast for the paper called Office Hours her senior year. She did the undergraduate Medill on the Hill program in Winter 2015 and studied abroad in Seville, Spain in Fall 2016.

Though her first internship was with The Wichita Eagle, her Journalism Residency at WLRN Public Media in South Florida led her into radio.

Madeline joined the Kansas News Service, a collaboration of four Kansas stations, as their Topeka-based social welfare reporter in October 2017. While there, she covered upheaval in the state’s troubled foster care system, and her reporting was later cited in a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging the state was failing children in its care. She also covered housing, food insecurity and the 2018 election of Governor Laura Kelly. Her work was regularly picked up by newspapers around Kansas and by radio stations around the country. She contributed reporting and extensive archival research to the award-winning “Summer of Mercy” episode of the news service’s My Fellow Kansans podcast.

In April 2019, Madeline returned to WLRN as the station’s Palm Beach County reporter, covering everything from Tuesday night intergenerational karaoke in Boynton Beach to the impact of the president’s Palm Beach visits on local government budgets. Her work on the arrival of Bahamians whose homes had been decimated by Hurricane Dorian and on teenage Q’anjob’al speakers translating government and health announcements for the Mayan community won the statewide journalism Sunshine State Awards, and some of her work appeared on NPR and PRI.

A year later, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she returned to the Midwest as the K-12, early education and childhood reporter for Wisconsin Public Radio, based in Milwaukee. She covered pandemic learning beginning with schools’ initial shutdown in March 2020, covering how students, families and teachers coped with rapidly changing information about an evolving disease. She also reported on months of social justice protests following the Minneapolis killing of George Floyd, and later reported from Kenosha following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. She also watched the Milwaukee Bucks win the 2021 NBA Championship from the Deer District in downtown Milwaukee, interviewing fans about their first title in 50 years.