Emily Carter Reynolds first walked into a newsroom at 19, tagging along with her aunt who was a copy editor at the Bucks County Courier Times. She spent that summer answering phones and fetching coffee, but what stuck was watching reporters piece together a story about a local zoning scandal—the way documents, sources, and shoe-leather reporting came together to reveal something the public needed to know. She’s been chasing that feeling ever since.
What She Covers
Now in her eleventh year covering Philadelphia, Emily reports on City Hall for News of Philadelphia, tracking everything from budget negotiations to the ongoing debates around the city’s property tax assessment system. Her 2021 series examining how Philadelphia’s tax abatement program reshaped development patterns in Fishtown and Point Breeze earned her a Keystone Press Award for investigative reporting. More recently, she’s been digging into the city’s contract procurement process and the small vendors who struggle to navigate it.
Career Background
Before joining News of Philadelphia in 2019, Emily spent six years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, where she covered the Kenney administration’s first term and broke the story on delayed lead pipe replacement in Kensington. She started her career at the Norristown Times Herald covering Montgomery County courts. She holds a journalism degree from Temple University, where she occasionally guest-lectures in the investigative reporting seminar.
Emily grew up in Lansdale, and while she now lives in West Philadelphia with her partner and an extremely loud cat named Walter Cronkite, she still makes regular trips back to Montgomery County to visit family—and to eat at her favorite diner off Route 202.
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Contact: 📧 [email protected]