Phil Bronstein, former executive editor for the San Francisco Chronicle

As a summer intern at the San Francisco Chronicle, Kantele Franko… produced dozens of thoughtful, thoroughly reported stories and often worked late hours to help colleagues with breaking news.

Whether she was interviewing ranchers, crime-scene witnesses or bureaucrats, Kantele showed a talent for sniffing out a great story without help from editors. She also excelled in pursuing multimedia additions to her stories; for example, she produced a touching podcast about a famous 1977 protest at San Francisco’s International Hotel.

Kantele eagerly accepted assignments piled on her, often working on several at a time. By the end of her internship, assigning editors were squabbling about who would get to work with her. She required very little editing; her copy was clean and accurate, her reporting strong and authoritative. She wrote with a clear and distinctive voice, frequently coming up with anecdotes that were laugh-out-loud funny.

Richard Rouan, editor-in-chief for The Post

Kantele Franko can chase fire trucks and cop cars or cover a national tragedy miles away from the event itself. She can uncover the intricate complications of a failing city infrastructure and D.C. politics. Frankly, if you hand the girl a notebook and a pen, she can pound out a story faster and better than anyone else in a newsroom.

And others have recognized that already.

Kantele has not only interned in various newsrooms -- sometimes in the hearts of big cities, other times on the fringe of small towns -- but she is also an award-winning college journalist. Her series of stories uncovering the ailing Athens infrastructure took first place in the Society of Professional Journalists Region IV Mark of Excellence awards in the In-Depth Reporting category. That same series is a finalist in the region for The Associated Press of Ohio award for enterprise reporting, competing not with other college news articles, but with other newspapers in the state.

When she graduates in June to enter the real world of journalism for good, a newspaper somewhere is going to be lucky to have her dedication and talent.

Audrey Cooper, assistant Metro editor for The San Francisco Chronicle

One of Kantele's first assignments at The Chronicle was to go to the city dump and write a story that made me smell the place. She came back, car and clothes reeking with that stench, and wrote a story that made my stomach turn. I get sick thinking about it.

It was awesome.

Jody Beck, director of the Scripps Howard Foundation’s Semester in Washington program

She is an enthusiastic, resourceful journalist who finds story ideas and doesn’t mind getting up before dawn to get them. She was part of our team covering the pope’s recent visit to Washington. She and a reporting colleague were at Nationals Stadium soon after 6 a.m. to talk to people arriving for the Mass. Once everyone was inside, the other reporter left for another assignment, giving Kantele her notes. The stadium area is largely undeveloped, and the Mass was expected to last for two hours, so Kantele trekked for a mile or so to find a coffee shop where she could write her story.

Matt Zapotosky, reporter for The Washington Post

One of the moments that stand out to me in Kantele's journalistic career in college was her work during the shootings at Virginia Tech. While I bet most college newspapers outside of Virginia were satisfied to run wire stories with localizations, Kantele sprung into action, adding to an AP story witness accounts that she tracked by phone from Athens, Ohio. Using Facebook, e-mail and a telephone, she put together a comprehensive package on one of the biggest news events that year -- a package she could rightly attach her own byline to. What separates Kantele from other college journalists is that relentlessness and drive.

Another example of that drive was her series of stories on the ailing infrastructure in Athens, the town where we went to college. That was a story Kantele and I had talked about for more than two years, and I was actually supposed to write it before I starting managing the opinion page at The Post, our college paper. Using some records that I had requested -- and gathering hundreds of pages of her own records -- Kantele finally completed the story in her junior year. I'm pretty sure it won a few awards -- just another example of Kantele's unwillingness to let go what she knows is a good story.

Source | The San Francisco Chronicle
Yolo County - Along the golden slopes of Bobcat Ranch, recently planted rows of native grasses bend in the breeze, just across a dirt road from the field where grazing cattle served as weed control in May.

Source | The San Francisco Chronicle
At the SF Recycling and Disposal complex in Brisbane, a 6-foot-tall artificial skull and several fake tombstones rest on a hillside spotted with wounded mannequins, Santa statues, stuffed animals and a fleet of Tonka trucks.

Source | The Post
Problems with Athens’ aging streets and buildings catch residents’ attention as visible eyesores, but the city’s biggest infrastructure crisis lurks below ground and hidden from view, capturing the public eye only after its costly damage is done.