AZCIR announced Monday that it has hired Isaac Stone Simonelli as a Roy W. Howard Fellow for a year-long investigative reporting fellowship.
He joins AZCIR as an award-winning reporter and editor with more than a decade of experience, from data-driven reporting on the U.S. energy sector to photojournalism and drone footage captured across several continents.

Isaac Stone Simonelli
roy w. howard fellow
Most recently, Simonelli earned a master’s degree in investigative journalism from ASU’s Cronkite School of Journalism, where he completed a capstone at its Howard Center for Investigative Journalism—the namesake of his fellowship program.
The fellowship was established in 2020 to honor legendary journalist Roy W. Howard, who later became a news executive with The E.W. Scripps Company. It is open only to graduates from the Howard Centers of Investigative Journalism at ASU and the University of Maryland. AZCIR was one of four newsrooms selected to host this latest class of fellows.
Previously, Simonelli was editor of the Kodiak Daily Mirror in Alaska after a brief stint as a copy editor with the publication’s sister newspaper, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Simonelli also served as the managing editor of the Phuket Gazette in Thailand, where he transformed the newsroom into a digital-first publication that focused its resources on enterprise reporting.
He has written for publications such as the Alaska Business Magazine, Climbing Magazine and ADVMOTO Magazine, and his investigations have been published by organizations such as The Washington Post, Inside Climate News and the Associated Press.
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