Andale Gross named head of Race and Ethnicity team

We are thrilled to announce that Andale Gross has been hired as the news editor for the Race and Ethnicity beat team. Andale brings more than a decade of AP experience to the position, having worked as an editor on the Central Desk and Race and Ethnicity team while guiding several award-winning projects.

This is an exciting and crucial hire for the AP as we head into a presidential election year where race is embedded in nearly every aspect of the campaign. Andale will oversee reporters on the Race and Ethnicity team, collaborate closely with AP bureaus in Washington and beyond on race coverage and take the immediate lead in the hiring of two journalists: a race and ethnicity reporter and a six-month intern for the team. These hires, combined with the AP’s existing Race and Ethnicity team, position us to smartly and aggressively cover race and how it intersects with an array of topics, from 2020 politics, criminal justice, immigration, education to sports or entertainment.

Andale brings an impressive resume and credentials to the position. 

He has helped lead law enforcement coverage in the Central region, coaching reporters on beat development and how to approach stories about police shootings, gang violence and other topics. He’s also been a vital contributor to the Race and Ethnicity team and was dispatched to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 to cover the unrest after a grand jury decided not to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown.

In 2018, he and others from the Race and Ethnicity team received an Associated Press Media Editors Award for best digital storytelling for a project about the Little Rock Nine. The multiformat project examined race 60 years after nine black students tested the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling by enrolling at a Little Rock, Arkansas, high school that had been all white.

Gross helped edit two other major Race and Ethnicity projects as well: Red Summer and Game Changers. The Red Summer project, which was published earlier this year and won an AP Best of the States award, looked at attacks during 1919 in which hundreds of blacks died at the hands of whites and the impact on the communities where the violence occurred. Game Changers, an AP Best of the Week recipient published in 2018, took a multiformat look at how black athletes have used their sports platforms for more than 100 years to impact social and political change.  

He was a mentor from 2012 to 2017 with the National Association of Black Journalists’ Student Multimedia Project, where he helped oversee a newsroom restructuring that emphasized multiformat training for students. And this year, he was a Top Stories fellow, where he helped guide breaking news from around the globe.

Gross has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri.

Andale will continue to be based in Chicago. Please join us in congratulating Andale in this exciting new opportunity.

Noreen and Josh