Savannah Tryens-Fernandes
Savannah Tryens-Fernandes follows the money in Alabama’s health and education systems, documenting how insurance decisions, public funding and institutional policies shape the lives of children and families. Her coverage at AL.com’s Alabama Education Lab focuses on the financial pressures around child wellness and mental health, connecting individual stories to the structures of hospitals, schools and social services. She writes in-depth, accountability-minded pieces that track payment disputes, resource gaps and systemic barriers rather than isolated events.
Health insurance, hospitals and payment disputes
A significant strand of Tryens-Fernandes’ work examines health insurers’ financial relationships with hospitals and the patients who depend on them. In her coverage of Jackson Hospital’s emergency request for higher payments from Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama, she traces how negotiated reimbursement rates, bankruptcy proceedings and threatened closure intersect, treating the court ruling as part of a larger story about hospital solvency and insurer leverage. Her reporting on ambulance service in Greene County connects low insurance payments, Medicaid and Medicare billing, and the cost of replacement vehicles to the fragility of emergency medical services in rural communities.
Across these pieces, she documents the details of reimbursement formulas and funding fixes, but keeps the focus on whether patients can access care and whether institutions can remain viable.
Her work feeds into and is referenced by broader investigations inside the newsroom that scrutinize Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Alabama’s denial rates and grip on the state’s health insurance market. In that context, colleagues cite her yearlong reporting on denial rates for Affordable Care Act patients and the consequences for people seeking specialized treatment, underscoring her role in building a record of how insurer decisions translate into human and financial risk. The balance of legal detail, contract terms and lived impact characterizes this side of her beat.
Child health, schools and resource gaps
Tryens-Fernandes also reports extensively on how school systems manage the basic health needs of students, including food, mental health support and stable learning environments.
Her work on Alabama schools battling food shortages during the pandemic shows how supply chain problems and funding constraints affect school meal programs, emphasizing the operational and budget pressures behind what children receive at lunch. Within the Alabama Education Lab team, she is designated as a child health and wellness reporter, with a brief to cover efforts to address child mental health and wellness inside and outside classrooms.
That remit is reflected in stories that track school-based initiatives and nonprofits designed to stabilize children’s lives during crises.
Her project on Magic City Acceptance Academy, a new charter school, goes beyond launch coverage to build a detailed picture of classrooms, students’ lives and the relationships surrounding them over several months. In this work she examines how concepts such as affirmation, safe spaces and inclusion operate in practice, particularly for LGBTQ students, while also noting the increasing political targeting of LGBTQ children in Alabama. The reporting links school culture to broader policy debates, treating the school as a test case for how educational institutions can support vulnerable students amid shifting political and financial realities.
Discipline, disability and access to care
A recurring focus in Tryens-Fernandes’ reporting is how systems of discipline and disability services affect access to education and medical care.
She has followed a high school senior who spent most of his year in disciplinary limbo, later withdrawing and finishing high school through homeschooling, using the case to explore the consequences of school discipline policies and alternative schools. In coverage of federal complaints about extreme barriers for adults and children with disabilities to access care, she highlights systemic obstacles that place people at risk, tying regulatory actions to gaps in service provision.
Her reporting on a Lee County case overturning the conviction of a woman imprisoned after losing a child while using drugs adds another layer, pointing to how criminal legal decisions intersect with health, pregnancy and family stability.
Across these pieces, she often writes at the intersection of law, policy and the practical availability of services, showing how rules on paper translate into disrupted schooling or blocked medical care.
The emphasis is less on isolated incidents and more on patterns: when discipline becomes prolonged exclusion, when disability complaints reveal systemic failures, and when criminal proceedings compound health crises. This strand of her work reinforces her broader interest in systems that are supposed to protect children but instead expose them to instability.
Youth homelessness, mental health and social supports
Tryens-Fernandes’ beat extends into youth homelessness and the mental health consequences of unstable housing. She has reported on a Birmingham nonprofit helping children whose parents died during COVID-19 out of homelessness, focusing on how targeted support can rebuild safety and routine for young people in crisis. As a mental health journalism fellow, she has taken on coverage of a new youth homeless shelter, documenting the impact of the first facility of its kind and the services it brings into a community that previously lacked dedicated resources.
In these stories, funding structures, grant support and program design are treated as central, not background detail, because they determine whether children receive sustained help or short-term relief.
Her professional background includes work documenting xenophobic violence against migrants in South Africa as a senior associate at an international human rights organization, experience that informs her attention to vulnerable populations and systemic harm in her current reporting. Combined with her role within AL.com’s Alabama Education Lab, this history gives her coverage a consistent lens: she uses individual narratives to scrutinize how financial arrangements, policy choices and institutional practices affect the health and stability of children and families across Alabama.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
Alex Harring turns fast-moving market, economic and corporate developments into clear pre-market briefings that show what will matter when U.S. trading opens. He is a markets and economics reporter for CNBC’s digital platforms and writes Morning Squawk, a flagship daily newsletter that gives readers five key things to know before the stock market opens. His beat spans financial markets, investing, consumer trends and the U.S. economy, with coverage of central bank decisions, inflation, corporate strategy, sector moves and geopolitical shocks. He focuses on how policy, data and earnings shape equities, interest rates, currencies and investor positioning, linking price action with underlying drivers in real time and in reported features. Harring’s background reporting on corporate news, business and the economy across print, digital, broadcast and streaming informs his habit of connecting markets, companies and geopolitics in one frame.