The Crawford County Independent & Kickapoo Scout has been blessed to work with some very talented, award-winning journalists.

One of the latest to be recognized for her accomplishments is Ambrosia Wojahn, who worked at the Independent-Scout, while attending Laurel High School in Viroqua.

Ambrosia won several Wisconsin Newspaper Association awards for her reporting at the weekly newspaper from 2022 to 2024. She has gone on to be the editor of  the Spectator, the UW-Eau Claire student Newspaper.

Recently, the college journalist was selected as the recipient of her school’s Ann Devroy Fellowship, which allowed her 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 among other news outlets, Ambrosia explained.

That Ambrosia Wojahn was selected for this prestigious fellowship did not surprise those who have worked with her at the Independent-Scout.

“Well, of course she was selected for the fellowship,” was reporter Gillian Pomplun’s reaction when she heard the news. Gillian and Ambrosia worked together on countless stories, bringing a plethora of relevant conservation news to the Independent-Scout readers.

It was about the same for reporter Jordan Derrick, who worked with Ambrosia covering the 2024 Presidential Campaign in Wisconsin.

“Ambrosia winning the fellowship is hardly a surprise,” Jordan said. “She is very talented and works extremely hard–that becomes pretty obvious when you work with her.”

So what was Ambrosia’s fellowship in Washington D.C. working at the Post really like?

“I spent three weeks in Washington, D.C. working with the Climate Team at the Washington Post,” Ambrosia 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, Ambrosia was able to  visit Politico.

Evan currently serves as the editor of the Climate Change Team at Politico, long since removed from his Wisconsin roots.

“The tour of the Politico office was awesome,” the young journalist recalled. “It was just really beautiful.”

Well, it was no ordinary three weeks at the legendary Washington Post during Ambrosia Wojahn’s three-week fellowship. Almost immediately, FBI agents searched a Washington Post reporter’s home as part of a leak investigation into a Pentagon contractor accused of taking home classified information, the Justice Department said. 

Reporter Hannah Natanson, who had been covering President Donald Trump’s transformation of the federal government, had a phone, two laptops and a Garmin watch seized in the search of her Virginia home, the Post reported. Natanson has reported extensively on the federal workforce and recently published a piece describing how she gained hundreds of new sources — leading one colleague to call her “the federal government whisperer.” 

While classified documents investigations aren’t unusual, the search of a reporter’s home marks an escalation in the government’s efforts to crack down on leaks. The Post was told that Natanson and the newspaper are not targets of the probe, executive editor Matt Murray said in an email to colleagues. 

Then, just 10 days after Ambrosia finished the fellowship, another bombshell exploded at the Post. The Washington Post laid off one-third of its staff on Wednesday, February 4; eliminating its sports section, several foreign bureaus and its books coverage in a widespread purge that represented a brutal blow to journalism and one of its most legendary brands.

The Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, called the move painful but necessary to put the outlet on stronger footing and to weather changes in technology and user habits.

“We can’t be everything to everyone,” Murray said in a note to staff members.

He outlined the changes in a companywide online meeting, and staff members then began getting emails with one of two subject lines — telling them their role was or was not eliminated.

Toward the end of her fellowship, Ambrosia was granted a 15-minute meeting with Matt Murray, the executive editor. Murray told her it was a time of extreme experimentation.

Ambrosia actually quoted Murray as telling her, “We’re still struggling, throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.”

What does Ambrosia think of the situation at the Post?

“I truly can’t believe what the Post has done,” Ambrosia said earlier this week. “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.”

Well, there’s turmoil, but there’s still a future out there and there are still talented journalists, like Ambrosia Wojahn, to get to work righting the ship.

Congratulations Ambrosia from your old friends at the Independent-Scout!

Editor’s note: Information from Associated Press stories covering events at the Washington Post were used in this story.