John Heaston is editor and publisher of The Reader and El Perico. Heaston co-founded The Reader in 1994.
Chris has worked for The Reader since January 2020. As an investigative reporter and news editor he’s taken deep dives into topics such as police transparency, affordable housing and COVID-19. Originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, Chris came to Nebraska to study at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s College of Journalism and Mass Communication and traveled for internships at the Tampa Bay Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Atlanta Journal Constitution before moving to Omaha and joining The Reader.
Bridget Fogarty joined The Reader and El Perico in 2021 through Report for America, a national program that pairs, and helps pay for, journalists with newsrooms.
Karlha Velásquez joined El Perico in 2019 and has since become its associate publisher and editorial leader.
Mark McGaugh
Mark is a journalist and multimedia producer with 1st Sky Omaha, a media partner of The Reader
Mark is an Omaha native and a proud graduate of Florida A&M University. He’s been working as a journalist and producer since 2015, and has been with The Reader since late 2019. Mark enjoys the work The Reader does and is pleased to give his community a voice through honest journalism and story-telling. Mark is a strong believer in good journalism as a form of activism and protecting the vitality of the “fourth estate.”
Lynn Sanchez joined The Reader as an employee in 2019 after doing freelance video gigs for Pioneer Media and other companies for about six years. She also has a degree in journalism from UNO. She hires and coordinates freelance talent for creative projects, print and online content used by The Reader and Pioneer Media including video, audio, writing and photography.
Tylonda is a newbie at The Reader, having just started at the end of May 2021 to sell the ads and digital marketing services. Although not working as a writer technically, she counts as one of her personal heroes Ida B. Wells. She believes that knowledge is power, and the written word is key to that knowledge. She has a degree from the University of Nebraska- Lincoln in English Literature and is a voracious reader. Her background includes editing and writing book reviews for a quarterly magazine and more recently hospitality sales for a large hotel chain.
Anton Johnson began with The Reader as a summer intern in 2021. He continues to report on the Omaha City Council.
When the cinematic majesty of Blade II was unleashed upon the world in March of 2002, so were Ryan’s opinions on movies. Over the last nearly two decades, he has written thousands of reviews and endured at least as many insults for those reviews. He isn’t produce but is a certified Rotten Tomato (critic), and his work has been syndicated at The Boulder Weekly. He intends to help establish a Midwest Film Critic Society but has also been saying that for a long time now.
Mike Krainak
Art Editor
A former instructor in journalism, film studies and the Humanities for 40 plus years at the college and secondary level, Mike Krainak has been the Contributing Visual Arts Editor at TR for the past decade mentoring a group of well over two dozen writers who’ve covered the Metro arts scene. In addition, he is a free lance writer whose film and fine arts criticism and essays have been published for the past 18 years in TR, the former City Weekly, the regional arts journal Review in Kansas City and for several art venues and various fine artists as well.
B.J. Huchtemann
Senior Contributing Writer, Hoodoo Columnist
photo credit: Chip Duden
B.J. Huchtemann is a senior contributing writer and columnist for The Reader. Her “Hoodoo” column covers blues, Americana and other types of roots music with an emphasis on the value of live music performances. She is a 2015 recipient of the Keeping the Blues Alive Award for Journalism from the Blues Foundation in Memphis. She received a 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards. In addition to her work in music journalism, she also has extensive experience in communication, advertising, media and television production.
Sara Locke is an award winning journalist, copywriter, and author living, working, and raising her three children in Omaha. Nebraska. Locke has served as the Contributing Editor for The Reader’s Dish section since 2014, and is passionately driven to share not only the dishes that make Omaha worth talking about, but the human interest stories behind each menu.
Robyn Murray has been copy/news editor at The Reader since 2019. A former news director at KVNO News in Omaha, Robyn has reported for National Public Radio, Public Radio International, WNYC and WBUR. Her print work has appeared in USA Today and Business Day in Johannesburg, South Africa. Robyn now works in nonprofit communications and gets her journalism fix from The Reader, where she also contributes the periodic column DIS|PLACE. Robyn received her bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communications from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University and her master’s in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.