Styf: Welcome Amanda Marrazzo to the Northwest Herald

You might have noticed a new name in our pages over the past few weeks, and that name might have sounded familiar to you, as well.

That’s because our new reporter, Amanda Marrazzo, has plenty of experience covering McHenry County news and courts. She covered the AJ Freund case in detail. She covered the death of Johnsburg’s Brian Carrick in detail. And she’s covered pretty much everything big that’s happened here in between over the past 16 years.

Now, she’s covering Crystal Lake, its school districts and is the Northwest Herald’s senior reporter, a position last held by Ed Komenda.

We couldn’t be happier to have Amanda working for our subscribers here, working to inform those in Crystal Lake and throughout the McHenry County area on what is happening here.

Hiring Amanda is a credit to the support of our subscribers. She brings along her strong credibility on being a reliable source for local news coverage and has already shown it with her coverage of everything from courts to impact fees in Crystal Lake, a difficult and complex topic that should be important to taxpayers as local entities look to balance infrastructure needs with property tax burden and growth.

Amanda is a storyteller, a trusted reporter who the community knows it can talk to, and don't hesitate to reach out to her (amarrazzo@shawmedia.com) or myself with any news you believe we should be reporting on.

Amanda also will be playing an important role in a project we are working on – with fellow reporter Katie Smith (ksmith@shawmedia.com) heavily involved – that will look to provide context to the AJ Freund case by looking at the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services.

If you have had direct experience with DCFS and would like to help us in our mission to tell that story properly, please reach out to any of us. We currently are lining up interviews and would love to hear from you.

Expect to see that work later this year in print, online and with plenty of multimedia involved as well. Since the Freund case began, we’ve heard from many in the community with their thoughts and experiences related and unrelated to this case.

We feel it’s our duty to bring you, our subscribers, more information that could help this process in the future. Because an informed community is one that can act to make things better. That’s our role and we plan to fulfill it.

Amanda isn’t our only new full-time reporter. On Monday, we will welcome Cassie Buchman (cbuchman@shawmedia.com), who recently completed an internship at the Springfield State Journal-Register and the graduate Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois-Springfield.

Cassie originally is from nearby Palatine and will be joining our team to cover Cary, Algonquin, Fox River Grove and more.

• Northwest Herald Editor Jon Styf can be reached at jstyf@shawmedia.com or 815-526-4630.