Ryan L. Nave, who also reports on state government, previously was news editor at the Jackson Free Press, where he reported on local, state and national issues. Before coming to Mississippi in 2011, he was a freelance journalist in Albuquerque, N.M., Boulder, Colo., and Seattle covering environmental-business issues. Prior to that, he covered local and state government and Barack Obama’s presidential campaign for the Illinois Times. Nave was a 2010-2011 Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow at the University of Colorado-Boulder and a 2004 Academy for Alternative Journalism fellow at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. A native of University City, Mo., he earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Missouri-Columbia.