About Victoria
Victoria Pelham is a journalist currently reporting out of Washington, D.C. and a recent honors graduate of Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, where she earned dual bachelor's and master's degrees.
Her work has appeared in The Dallas Morning News, Bloomberg News (where she interned in 2011), Bloomberg BusinessWeek magazine, USA Today, Arizona Republic, Arizona Capitol Times, Phoenix Business Journal and Sacramento Bee, among other publications, through several internships, freelancing and her work for the Cronkite School's professional capstone news wire.
Her journalism experience has taken her from the halls of Congress and the White House to a crowded room of Burmese refugees learning English to help their children with school, a citrus farm where a struggling farmer spoke of the commercial real estate that drove out his crops, and downtown Phoenix streets where former prostitutes marched past motels where pimps lived protesting a system that they said protects the abusers and punishes the abused. She has produced breaking, enterprise and feature stories on Native American affairs, the federal judiciary and the Syrian opposition, among other topics.
While at the Cronkite School, she also wrote and defended an honors thesis examining and comparing violence against the press in Mexico and Colombia and resulting asylum claims, which included first-hand interviews with attorneys and regional journalists who had experienced dangerous run-ins with drug cartels. She served as a night editor and business news editor for the award-winning independent news website Downtown Devil, managing reporters on business stories, editing copy each week, and updating HTML for the front page of its website.
Her training also gave her the chance to develop skills such as videography, Final Cut Pro, HTML/CSS coding in Adobe Dreamweaver and media database research, a skill she put to use as a researcher on a lead BusinessWeek story about political funding for municipal broadband.
Originally from England, Victoria is British, Mexican and a naturalized American. With her diverse background, she was raised from a young age with a deep cultural awareness that led to a passion for languages. She is fluent in Spanish, has working proficiency in university-level Modern Standard Arabic and is conversational in French.
She hopes to use the skills she has gained to tell the stories of people from all walks of life and to accurately represent them in the media.