Vanessa Gongora
Vanessa Gongora tells stories from the perspective of people living with the consequences of traffic decisions, public safety policies, and neighborhood change. As a multimedia journalist and Westside reporter for KGUN 9, she focuses on how roads, enforcement, and local institutions shape daily life in the communities she covers. Her coverage of proposals to bring red light cameras and photo radar back to Tucson intersections fits into a broader pattern of reporting that links transportation policy to safety at the city’s busiest crossroads. In short video explainers, she breaks down how car crashes are distributed across the city, emphasizing that a large share happen at intersections and highlighting why specific locations become flashpoints in public debates. She joined KGUN 9 in December 2024 and also advocates for domestic violence awareness, bringing a consistent focus on safety and harm inside homes and neighborhoods.
Traffic enforcement, crashes, and dangerous intersections
Gongora’s transportation stories concentrate on the overlap between traffic enforcement, crash patterns, and the everyday experience of driving through the city.
Her work on red light cameras and photo radar returning to Tucson intersections sits alongside reporting that calls out how most crashes occur at or near intersections, sharpening the stakes of policy discussions for viewers who use those roads every day. On social platforms she presents herself as a friendly neighborhood reporter, using short videos to talk through where crashes are happening and why particular corridors worry residents.
She also profiles life on the road from a different angle, as in a feature on a mobile coffee business titled “Caffeine on wheels,” where a family’s grind is literally playing out on local streets and parking lots. Across these pieces she treats roads not just as infrastructure, but as shared spaces where safety, livelihood, and community habits intersect.
Desert gunfire and neighborhood safety
Beyond traffic, Gongora covers threats that originate on the edges of the city but land directly in residential areas, including stray gunfire from nearby desert areas hitting Westside homes. In that reporting she follows how local government addresses complaints about bullets striking houses, giving attention to both officials’ responses and the fear and frustration of residents who feel exposed in their own neighborhoods.
Her domestic violence advocacy sits alongside this coverage, reinforcing a through-line of concern for people whose homes and families are at risk from violence, whether it comes from inside the household or from gunfire outside. The cumulative effect is a body of work that treats safety as a lived condition, not an abstract statistic.
Veterans, families, and Westside community support
Gongora’s Westside beat also includes a steady run of stories about community support systems, especially for veterans and families with limited resources. She has reported on the recovery process at a veterans’ organization in Three Points, tracking how a local VFW post works to rebuild and reopen after setbacks while remaining a gathering place for those who served.
In another piece, she highlighted a project offering free Halloween costumes for children in need, framing it as a simple but meaningful way neighbors step up for families who might otherwise be left out of seasonal traditions. She has also covered a gardening initiative that offers homeless veterans a fresh start, showing how a small, locally run program can provide routine, purpose, and fresh food to people trying to regain stability. Even in lighter features like the “Caffeine on wheels” story, she foregrounds the work and sacrifice behind family-run businesses, emphasizing the community ties that keep them rolling.
These pieces give her beat a strong human-interest dimension, with attention to how ordinary people organize help for one another without much fanfare.
From crime scenes to federal offices: live public-safety coverage
Gongora also handles live and breaking coverage when public-safety stories escalate into urgent events.
At KGUN 9 she has reported live from a federal immigration office after a woman was detained, explaining the situation from outside the facility and capturing the tension surrounding the case as it unfolded. Before joining the station she covered crime for another local television newsroom, including a shooting in which she interviewed a nearby man who described hearing the entire incident, using his account to reconstruct what happened just after New Year’s. That background in breaking crime news and on-scene interviews informs the way she now approaches sensitive institutions and enforcement agencies, balancing immediacy with the voices of people directly affected.
Across her work, Gongora keeps a close feedback loop with the people she covers, regularly sharing her professional email and inviting residents to send story ideas and concerns. She describes herself publicly as a reporter who “tells stories for a living,” and her beat reflects that claim, moving fluidly from traffic enforcement to stray gunfire, from veterans’ recovery to family-run businesses, always with an ear for how policy and circumstance land on specific blocks and households.
4 more automobile journalists.
Aarian Marshall
Aarian Marshall is a staff writer at WIRED who stands out for covering how cars, software, and policy collide. She writes on transportation systems and cities, from the auto industry to broader mobility systems. Before WIRED, she reported on cities and urban policy for The Atlantic’s CityLab. Her beat runs from electric vehicles, fuel prices, tariffs, and car-buying decisions to autonomous vehicles, robotaxis, and software-defined cars. She reports with a systems view, linking policy shifts, technical failures, and urban life to what happens on streets, in repair shops, and at the pump.
Abby Smith
Abby Smith’s most distinctive work combines motorsports coverage with live digital and radio reporting. She is Digital Director at KRDO13 and covers the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, including race updates, weather shifts, breaking developments and ways to follow the action. Her beat also includes automotive news, crime, public safety, politics, city government and community life. Notable work includes coverage of homicide arrests, a major drug bust, a presidential address about the war with Iran, a family’s effort to bring Stephen Hubbard home, a state governor candidate and a city security ordinance. She also reports on fitness, school spirit and station staff. Smith writes in a concise, factual style shaped by investigative documentary experience. She turns live events, official announcements and daily developments into clear coverage across digital and radio platforms.
Adele Peters
Adele Peters covers climate solutions and other structural problems as design and policy questions, focusing on what can work in practice. She is a senior writer at Fast Company, where she reports on energy, transportation, housing, materials, agriculture, corporate sustainability, and social impact. Her stories examine climate technologies, grid resilience, electric vehicles, renewable energy, modular construction, homelessness, affordable housing, compostable materials, regenerative agriculture, and ecosystem restoration. She looks at whether projects can scale, their real-world constraints, and their measurable effects. She interviews political and philanthropic leaders, startup founders, and climate tech entrepreneurs, anchoring stories in what is being built and tested. She has written more than 3,000 stories and contributed to Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century and State of Housing Design 2023.
Adrian Leung
Adrian Leung writes engineering-led coverage of Chinese electric vehicles and performance cars for CarNewsChina. He focuses on new energy vehicles, battery systems, powertrains, electric platforms, high-end domestic brands, and track-ready models, and he explains technical details in plain language for non-specialist readers. His reporting treats new models as hardware and systems stories, with precise figures on range, battery capacity, chassis layout, motor outputs, weight, and acceleration. He also covers the Chinese auto industry’s finances and technology roadmap, including sector profits, vehicle volumes, and solid-state battery timelines. His background in Electrical and Computer Engineering shows in the way he writes about vehicle electronics and battery management.