Overview: Breanna Reeves, a Los Angeles native and health reporter, joined Black Voice News (BVN) as the first full-time staff reporter and assistant editor through the Report for America program. She used data-driven reporting to highlight issues impacting Black Californians and covered a variety of stories, including the Birthing while Black series and the Black Joy series. Reeves also participated in fellowships and won awards for her health reporting. She sees a continued future in writing and interacting with words in any capacity.
Alyssah Hall
Los Angeles native and health reporter, Breanna Reeves has always enjoyed literature, hearing stories and learning more about others.
In high school, she joined yearbook since there wasn’t a journalism club and began writing small editorials. From 2013-2017 she attended San Francisco State University (SFSU) as a journalism major, where her introverted nature was challenged through community reporting. Reeves chose a historically Black neighborhood in San Francisco, the Fillmore district, to cover for a semester. Through covering different stories across that neighborhood and an emotional longform story in her senior year, she began to develop a love for highlighting underserved communities and telling their stories.
Reeves’ last day working for Black Voice News (BVN) was April 10, 2026. Throughout her almost five years with BVN she was a fellow for USC’s Center for Health Journalism California Fellowship (2022), participated as an editor for USC’s Center for Health Journalism Ethnic Media Health Reporting Collaborative (2024) and has won several awards for her health reporting.
In 2019, she studied abroad for a year at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where she achieved her master of science in politics and communication. Reeves’ focus at LSE was media and communications. After coming back to the states, one of Reeves’ favorite professors at SFSU, Laura Moorhead had reached out to her to apply to Report for America, a program that places journalists with local newsrooms to cover under-reported communities.
Reeves applied to Report for America and became a Report for America Corps member in 2021. She was interviewed by BVN Publisher, Paulette Brown-Hinds, PhD, Executive Editor, Stephanie Williams, and Project Director of Mapping Black California, Candice Mays. “I just thought it was so rare to see an all Black female team like that,” Reeves said. She became the first full time staff reporter and assistant editor for BVN/IE Voice where she used data-driven reporting to highlight issues that impact Black Californians.
“We were instantly impressed with Breanna and her commitment to telling our stories,” Brown-Hinds explained. “She has developed strong ties through her reporting and produced an award-winning impactful body of work during her five years with BVN.”
Working with BVN taught Reeves how to be more open in her story coverage. She was at first used to staying within her journalism beat, which is a fixed topic assigned to a reporter for consistent coverage. She recalls in her first year with BVN taking on a long form Covid series and at the time she hadn’t covered health before, nor had she had professional experience in writing longer stories. She praised Williams as a good mentor for her support and belief in her when Reeves wasn’t sure of herself. Reeves eventually found her groove in reporting across all topics and discovered she enjoyed covering more investigative pieces and long form stories because “you get the time to break it down for the audience.”
“ I really learned to be more open to covering topics because at the heart of it, these stories need to be told. I think it’s a really nice thing that Black Voice News gave me,” Reeves said.
“It’s made me smarter, more empathetic to what people are experiencing…I learned so much from my sources. I think our sources are the experts of their own experiences that really rings true for a lot of these stories,” Reeves shared.
Reeves has covered a variety of stories in her time with BVN and appreciates them all, but some of the stories and series that stand out to her include: Birthing while Black series; Inglewood’s Centinela Hospital Will Cease Maternity Care; Black Lash 2025 series; and the Black Joy series.
BVN was Reeves’ first newsroom gig and she appreciates the creative freedom that Williams gave her when it came to pitching stories to report on and her openness to explore Reeves’ different story approaches. Reeves said there is so much trust given at BVN for exploring stories that she knows is not the norm in a lot of other newsrooms and shared that she will miss that. She recalls covering a cannabis story in her second year with BVN where she had to interview a district attorney. She hadn’t felt too confident to conduct this interview on her own and asked Williams if she could accompany her. Williams sat in with Reeves in the interview and was able to assist and ask questions where Reeves felt she may have not. Reeves felt so comforted by that support and years later would be interviewing gubernatorial candidates on her own feeling more confident in herself because of the mentorship Williams gave her over the years.
“Having Breanna as a member of the BVN editorial team was truly a gift. She came to us with her own set of skills, hit the ground running and quickly proved herself to be a valuable asset to our team,” shared executive editor Stephanie Williams. “Over the years not only did she grow in her professional reporting skills, she is an excellent team leader for the other early career reporters on the team. Breanna will be missed and we wish her much success.”
As a self described writer by nature, Reeves sees a continued future in writing and interacting with words in any capacity. Whether she returns to journalism, editing manuscripts and stories, helping develop others stories or writing her own book, Reeves will always have a love for literature and continue to boldly take on the next chapter in her journey.