Chase DiBenedetto
Chase DiBenedetto is a Social Good reporter at Mashable who covers how technology, policy, and online culture shape education and the lives of young people. Her work traces the way digital tools and internet platforms show up in classrooms, activism, and fandom, and how those spaces are governed, regulated, and experienced day to day.
Classroom technology, policy, and youth experience
Education is a central strand of DiBenedetto’s reporting, with a focus on how schools respond to new technology and its impact on students. She writes on classroom phone bans and rising concern about screen time, examining why administrators restrict devices and how those decisions affect student learning and behavior. In coverage of AI policies at the nation’s largest school districts, she compares rules across systems like New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, detailing what students are allowed to do with generative AI and where clear lines are drawn.
Her reporting on whether AI belongs in K-12 classrooms brings together voices from parents, child safety advocates, AI literacy experts, tech industry figures, and policymakers to weigh the risks and benefits of emerging tools in schools. She also produces practical guidance pieces, such as a feature on “AI tutors” that evaluates their promises and limitations for student learning and homework help. Across these stories, she explains policy language in plain terms, connects it to everyday classroom scenarios, and highlights how rules around devices and AI change the student–teacher relationship.
Digital activism and online campaigns
DiBenedetto frequently reports on digital activism, tracing how online campaigns translate into fundraising, awareness, and political pressure.
She has covered TikTok’s viral watermelon “Filter for Good,” unpacking how the filter manipulates the platform’s creator rewards system to raise money for Palestine and why some users hesitate to trust its call to action. Her broader Social Good beat includes stories on climate justice, accessibility, and media representation, showing how marginalized communities use social platforms and tech tools to organize and tell their own stories.
These pieces often combine platform mechanics with human narratives, explaining how features like creator rewards, filters, and recommendation algorithms affect activism outcomes. DiBenedetto’s framing treats digital campaigns as both technical systems and social movements, emphasizing transparency, accountability, and the lived experience of participants.
Online safety, media regulation, and public health
A recurring interest in DiBenedetto’s work is the intersection of online safety, media regulation, and health. She has analyzed a controversial Super Bowl advertisement featuring Mike Tyson, characterizing it as a public health failure and dissecting the messaging, stigma, and misinformation it carries for people in recovery. In education-focused AI coverage, she scrutinizes how school districts interpret national AI guidelines, what counts as acceptable student use, and how administrators try to protect children from harm while still encouraging digital literacy.
Her reporting on tech regulation extends beyond schools, including co-bylined coverage of internal safety efforts at companies like OpenAI.
She also tracks how wearable devices, such as Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, are constrained by design choices like automatically disabling the camera when users tamper with recording indicators, tying product decisions to privacy and consent concerns. Across these stories, DiBenedetto highlights the consequences of policy and design choices for vulnerable users, especially young people and those navigating health-related stigma.
Creators, fandom, and the social web
DiBenedetto’s beat includes deep engagement with creators, fandom communities, and the social dynamics of online platforms. She has written about YouTubers Dan and Phil, treating their relationship reveal video as a blueprint for healthier parasocial relationships between creators and fans. Her work explores how creators set boundaries, communicate personal information, and model best practices for audiences who often feel intimately connected to people they only know online.
Alongside this, she reports on trends and memes that reflect wider cultural debates, connecting pop culture moments to questions of representation, responsibility, and the ethics of online influence. In these pieces, DiBenedetto treats fandom and internet culture as serious subjects, analyzing them with the same rigor she applies to education and policy coverage while remaining attentive to the tone and humor of the communities she covers.
4 more education journalists.
Abdul Latif Jameel
Abdul Latif Jameel publishes long-form, research-led pieces on how emerging technologies and scientific advances reshape education, industry, and society. He writes for the Abdul Latif Jameel masthead at the intersection of learning, innovation, and applied science, with a focus on technology, skills, and the future of learning. He explains complex fields such as quantum sensing in clear, accessible terms, breaking down frontier science and tying it to real-world applications. His coverage links breakthroughs in sensing, data, and automation to training, curriculum, and lifelong learning. He treats education as an applied system connected to industry, policy, infrastructure, and human development. He reports in an analytical, explanatory style, using research, pilots, and large-scale initiatives to examine how technologies are implemented, evaluated, and scaled in learning and training environments.
Abril Preciado
Abril Preciado is an Emmy award-winning bilingual television journalist at FOX6 News Milwaukee who focuses on education, school crises and policy decisions affecting students, families and staff. She follows school communities over months, from emergency response through investigations, relocation plans and the first day back in class. Her reporting on the Lincoln Avenue School fire covers displacement, safety changes, rebuilding and the move to temporary space. She also uses public records to examine local officials, test official claims and connect government conduct to public trust. Before joining FOX6, she reported for Univision in Sacramento, covering the Farm Workers March, wildfires, politics and the Latino community, and contributed border reporting for a national radio network. She centers families, explains complex decisions clearly and focuses on the human effects of policy.
Adria Iraheta
Adria Iraheta is a community-focused reporter at Denver7, distinct for centering students, families and residents in every story about schools, neighborhoods and public services. She covers how decisions by school districts, local agencies and public institutions land in daily life, with a particular focus on Aurora and Arapahoe County. Her beat sits at the intersection of education, community issues, public services, safety, infrastructure, health and climate, from job cuts in a school district to a new transit safety app, DMV outages, street changes and record heat waves. With a decade of local television reporting experience, she reports on the ground in specific local scenes, using plain language, direct questions to officials and clear explanations to show how policies, programs and changes affect the people who live, study and work in Colorado communities.
Alan J. Borsuk
Alan J. Borsuk stands out for connecting what happens in schools to the policy and political decisions behind them. He writes in-depth K-12 education analysis for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and serves as a senior fellow in law and public policy at Marquette University Law School. His work focuses on Milwaukee Public Schools, school choice, literacy, teacher pipelines, and school accountability. He uses long-range perspective, detailed reporting, and structured analysis to explain how reforms unfold, why they stall, and what they mean for students and leaders. He has also written on vouchers, Teach for America, discipline, and teacher evaluation, drawing on decades as a reporter and editor on education and public policy.