OREGON – Unified Newspaper Group has added two new reporters to its staff, the Oregon Observer announced Thursday.
Renee Hickman, who was born in Missouri and grew up in Georgia, has been hired to cover government and education news in Stoughton and Verona.
Hickman joins UNG after most recently covering politics and culture in Ukraine while completing a Fulbright scholarship. She also has worked as an intern for NBC News and Bloomberg.
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Hickman earned her undergraduate degree from the University of St. Andrew’s in Scotland and went on to get her master’s in journalism at the University of Missouri. While in Missouri, she covered state government for the Columbia Missourian and local news at KBIA, the local NPR station.
Neal Patten, a native of southwestern Wisconsin, will cover community news in Verona and Fitchburg for UNG.
Patten most recently served as director of marketing and public relations at Shalom Spirituality Center in Dubuque, Iowa. He earned his journalism degree at Ohio University, where he co-founded Brick Beats magazine with a friend and worked as a section editor at College Green Magazine, a student-run environmental blog.
In high school, Patten spent three years writing for Woodward Communication’s now-defunct Weekender, a feature-based community newspaper in Platteville. His work there earned Patten the Telegraph Herald Scholastic Journalist Award in 2009, which is given annually to two students active in the editorial aspect of newspapers.
Patten was the first Wisconsinite to the win in the then 16-year history of the award given out by the newspaper in Dubuque, Iowa. He also fulfilled his senior year job shadow requirement by spending a day at the Telegraph Herald, which shares a parent company — Woodward Communications — with UNG.
