Gannett forms state capitol bureau for Pennsylvania
Award-winning journalists Scott Fisher, Candy Woodall and J.D. Prose have been chosen to form a state capitol bureau to serve Gannett’s 14 Pennsylvania properties and the USA Today Network’s Atlantic Region.
Fisher will serve as bureau editor and will continue his news duties for the York Daily Record. Woodall, an investigative reporter for the York paper, will team with Prose, a longtime government and politics reporter for the Beaver County Times, to cover the capitol, statewide issues and supplement coverage for all of Gannett’s Pennsylvania publications.
“Our group covers Pennsylvania like no other, literally from corner to corner,” USA Today Network Pennsylvania Editor Shane Fitzgerald said in announcing the team. “We have significant presence outside the population centers but also are close enough to those centers that we truly can make a big impact.
“Candy and J.D. are experienced, savvy reporters who have achieved an amazing body of work,” Fitzgerald said. “And Fisher is an outstanding leader with a good knack for the important story. This is just a start for this bureau, and with all the issues in Pennsylvania, it’s conceivable we continue to add to this team. Readers in all of our markets are going to benefit from what Candy, J.D. and Scott will produce.”
Fisher is a husband, father, musician, runner, cyclist, hiker and career journalist. He started out editing a group of weekly newspapers in the Wilmington, Delaware, area, then came to York, as a news editor. He served as editorial page editor for The York Dispatch – and then moved to the York Daily Record in the same position.
In that capacity, he won numerous journalism awards and produced several award-winning long-form opinion enterprise projects – including an environmental piece on a problematic Susquehanna River dam, and a piece exploring the issue of police officers with DUIs who went unpunished and remained on the job.
He was the primary editor of a meticulously reported Chambersburg Public Opinion investigative project that fearlessly exposed a man described by some as the Jerry Sandusky of Franklin County. This was a pillar of the community and longtime Scoutmaster who abused at least 10 boys but who can’t be charged because of the statute of limitations. Fisher recently worked with a Chambersburg reporter on another investigative piece exposing abuse by staffers at a state-run detention center for juveniles with mental disabilities.
In his spare time, he serves as community engagement editor for YDR, producing lively public events. In 2019, those events included four sessions looking back at York’s race riots 50 years ago; an annual local history event; and four sold-out York Storytellers Project events (YDR is among the smallest Gannett properties operating this popular live storytelling venture).
As community engagement editor, he is the point-person for YDR’s successful Fixing York PA Facebook group. Fixing York has generated buzz throughout Gannett, which is using the initiative as a model for a new digital tool to bring community conversations and action initiatives on site.
Woodall has been an investigative reporter and political writer for the York Daily Record and USA Today Network since 2012.
She has spent most of the last three years covering racism, elections, the Catholic priest abuse scandal and an unregulated synthetic turf industry. Recently she has focused her watchdog reporting on the pandemic and its detrimental effects on the most vulnerable populations in Pennsylvania, especially nursing home residents and abused children.
She is a lead reporter covering the 2020 presidential election in Pennsylvania and a member of the USA Today national team assigned to cover the Democratic and Republican conventions in the summer.
She is a former news editor and lifelong listener, who got her start with a fifth-grade newspaper and never stopped writing. Woodall has 20 years of experience in Pennsylvania newsrooms and learned from some of Pittsburgh's best journalists at Point Park University.
Before joining the USA Today Network, Woodall worked with outstanding teams at PennLive and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She's also a mother, adventurer and devoted sports fan.
Prose has covered federal, state, county and municipal government and politics for more than 20 years from Beaver County and five surrounding counties. He played a prominent coverage role in 2016, including the presidential, U.S. House and Senate campaigns and the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
He also has extensive investigative and enterprise reporting background, much of which has been focused on the emerging natural gas drilling section in the Marcellus Shale basin and on the $6 billion Royal Dutch Shell ethane cracker plant currently under construction in Beaver County.
After earning his bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland, he got his professional start as news editor for the Prince George’s Post in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, managing the African-American weekly newspaper before moving over to The Gazette as a county government reporter in Landover, Maryland. He earned a Master of Arts degree from American University in Washington, D.C., in journalism and public affairs in 1998, and he joined the Beaver County Times in 1999.
Prose has television and radio experience with TV appearances include PCNC’s “NightTalk” in Pittsburgh, PCN’s “Journalist Roundtable” and “Telenoticies” on TV3, Barcelona, Spain.
He won the Pittsburgh Black Media Federation’s Robert L. Vann Award for newspaper public affairs reporting in May 2016 and has won several Keystone, Golden Quill and Pennsylvania Associated Press Media Editor awards over the years.
The USA Today Network in Pennsylvania consists of the Beaver County Times, the Bucks County Courier Times in Langhorne, the Chambersburg Public Opinion, the Ellwood City Ledger, the Erie Times-News, the Greencastle Echo Pilot, the Hanover Evening Sun, The Intelligencer in Doylestown, the Lebanon Daily News, the Pocono Record in Stroudsburg, the Somerset Daily American, the Tri-County Independent in Honesdale, the Waynesboro Record Herald and the York Daily Record.
This article originally appeared on Pocono Record: Gannett forms state capitol bureau for Pennsylvania
