Meet Our 2022 Rising Star Winner: Katherine Revello!
Even though our 2022 Annual Gala & Awards Ceremony has come and gone, we wanted to make sure we gave our 2022 Award Winners the attention and praise they deserve for all their work making their communities and this country more free and prosperous places. Let’s take a look at one of our 2022 Rising Stars: Katherine Revello!
Katherine’s story begins in college, where she credits her political science professor with pushing her to work hard and to set standards for intellectual rigor and objectivity. Thanks to him, Katherine developed a strong work ethic and habits from the outset. These skills helped her at the beginning of her career, as she struggled to find her place in the liberty movement. As the years went on, she began to shift her focus from commentary and national politics to hard news and more local issues. This then would eventually lead to her current position as a reporter with the Maine Wire.
In the fall of 2021, Katherine wasn’t afraid to ask well-reasoned questions during a COVID press conference hosted by the Maine CDC. For asking questions that would promote more government transparency, she was banned from attending future press conferences for being an “advocacy journalist.”
Fortunately for Katherine and journalists everywhere, this became a major news story and they were forced to reinstate her. The Goldwater Institute, the Reason Foundation, and the Maine Policy Institute filed a brief all the way to the Supreme Court supporting journalists and used her story as an example. Katherine points to this as a highlight of her career, saying “I’m proud to be part of a free speech case, as that’s a cause I’m very passionate about.” However, she’s equally as proud of the news story that started all this. Katherine was only able to break the story due to her source thinking she had been professional and fair to him. “I’m proud to know that’s the reputation I’ve developed,” she says.
As Katherine’s work and profile have grown, she’s held fast to her deep belief in freedom, motivated by the individual nature of life. As Katherine puts it, “No one knows what’s in the hearts or minds of another, which means the individual is the only person truly qualified to judge for themselves what’s in their best interest.”
While Katherine is still on the lookout for breaking news, she has larger goals on the horizon. One of the biggest challenges she faces in her current reporting is a lack of government transparency, having to jump through hoops and miles of red tape to get Freedom of Information requests filled. Katherine’s dream is a journalistic project looking at what freedom of access is like in states around the country. If you have experience working with FOIA requests, or studying journalistic access, Katherine would love to connect with you!
When she’s not breaking stories and writing headlines for the Maine Wire, you can find Katherine reading Ray Bradbury, listening to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and working her way through some Aristotelian political theory texts (you know, just your usual beach reads). As her nominator put it, “She has a razor-sharp intellect and is never afraid to speak her mind. Katherine is my hero.”
For future updates on Katherine and her important work, you can find her on Twitter under her handle @polisciwrites!