Ambrosia Wojahn, who worked at The Crawford County Independent & Kickapoo Scout while attending Laurel High School in Viroqua, has been chosen as the winner of the Ann Devroy Fellowship.
A story about her experience appeared in the Feb. 12, 2026 issue of the Independent-Scout. According to the story:
Wojahn won several Wisconsin Newspaper Association awards for her reporting at the weekly newspaper from 2022-24. She has gone on to be the editor of The Spectator, the UW-Eau Claire student newspaper.
Being the recipient of her school’s Ann Devroy Fellowship allowed Wojahn to work at The Washington Post for three weeks during her winter break.
UW-Eau Claire graduate Ann Devroy, for whom the fellowship was named, was a famous and tenacious White House correspondent, who worked at The Washington Post and other news outlets.
“I spent three weeks in Washington, D.C. working with the Climate Team at The Washington Post,” Wojahn explained. “I had the chance to meet a lot of incredible journalists during my time there, and worked with the team to publish three stories. One was about the Department of the Interior changing its policies about defacing National Park passes, when people cover Trump’s face with stickers; another was about how microplastics in soil are harming tomato growth, and another about the House voting to make way for mining to take place on public land near the Boundary Waters in Minnesota.”
Through a newspaper connection to the former editor of Lancaster’s Grant County Herald Independent, Evan Lehmann, Wojahn was able to visit Politico. Lehmann currently serves as the editor of the Climate Change Team at Politico.
“The tour of the Politico office was awesome,” Wojahn recalled. “It was just really beautiful.”
Similar to others in the journalism world, Wojahn was surprised when — 10 days after she finished her fellowship — The Post laid off one-third of its staff on Wednesday, Feb. 4.
“I truly can’t believe what the Post has done,” she said. “Nearly all of the fantastic journalists I met and worked with there, including essentially the entire Climate Team, now no longer have jobs. It feels like the Post is shooting themselves in the foot with this, and I’m deeply disappointed and concerned for the state of journalism.”
