The Star hires three breaking news reporters focusing on crime, justice

The Kansas City Star has hired three reporters, boosting its coverage of breaking news and adding strength to a team of journalists tasked with holding the criminal justice system accountable.

All three will join The Star’s breaking news team. Katie Moore, 36, will cover justice issues and profile victims of violence in the Kansas City area. Luke Nozicka, 24, will report on the region’s federal courts and law enforcement in Missouri. Katie Bernard, 21, will cover police and courts in Johnson County and surrounding districts.

Each has a track record of serving their communities by delivering breaking news with skill and professionalism while illuminating issues that affect their readers every day.

“When it comes to breaking news, our readers depend on us to tell them more than just what happened,” said Greg Farmer, The Star’s managing editor. “They want to know why it happened and who is responsible and how it might be prevented going forward.

“We’re adding three reporters who understand the mission and whose talents, empathy and commitment to serving our readers make a great breaking news team even better.”

Moore starts at The Star Wednesday after spending the past four years at the Topeka Capital-Journal, where she has covered breaking news and criminal justice. A native of Topeka, she graduated from the University of Kansas, earned a master’s degree at the University of San Diego and worked as a freelance photographer before becoming a newspaper reporter.

At the Capital-Journal, Moore’s stories have shed light on a controversial police shooting, an unlawful arrest caught on police body camera, and the challenges faced by the public in gaining access to those videos.

In reporting on homelessness and school resegregation, she has used her own photography and data visualization skills to tell stories in new, interesting ways.

Moore said she looks forward to telling stories “that hold those in power accountable … humanizing issues and showing why a systemic failure occurred, and bringing out voices that may be underrepresented.”

Nozicka, who grew up in the Chicago area and California, started work at The Star Monday. He comes to Kansas City from the Des Moines Register, where he has been a police and courts reporter since November 2017. Before that, he worked at The Star-Ledger and NJ.com in Woodbridge, New Jersey and as an intern at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

From running to the scenes of shootings to covering the devastation of a tornado, Nozicka is known for chasing stories relentlessly and treating traumatized families with care.

In Iowa, his reporting on the search for slain college student Mollie Tibbetts won praise around the country and the trust of the Tibbetts family.

“I would strive to be sensitive and compassionate to the friends and family of those killed,” Nozicka said. “I also want to do the work that holds accountable those who investigate and end up prosecuting crimes.”

Bernard is from Overland Park and returns to The Star May 1 after finishing an internship at CNN, where she spent the first half of the year covering breaking news and politics. She graduates from the University of Kansas this spring.

Readers of The Star may already be familiar with Bernard’s reporting. She worked with the breaking news team as an intern last year.

That summer, she reported on an alleged murderer’s history as a white supremacist; a Chinese missionary’s death at the hands of a PCP-crazed gunman, and she profiled a Wyandotte County deputies slain while transporting a jail inmate from court.

As she rejoins her hometown newspaper, Bernard said, she looks forward to the opportunity to “serve the community and be a part of it.”

“We feel very fortunate to be adding three reporters who want to do work that makes a difference in our city,” Farmer said. “They will be working hard for our readers every day.”