Tom Novak and Stella Mitchell are reporters for The Republic.
That American publication is a weekly news magazine which been around for quite a while taking its place on the newstands right next to rivals like Newsweek and Time. And like others of its type, in the days of the Internet and browsers on every electrical device, it has fallen on hard times. Without frequent major stories to drive circulation, it is in danger of shutting down.
Two of the reporters on the staff tasked with providing those breaking stories are Novak and Mitchell. Of the two, Novak is the more well known one in the States having been active here for several years and having won a couple of very prestigious awards doing so. Mitchell is far better known in her native England where she was for a good while known for incisive investigating.
Novak, I learned from a dossier provided me, was born in 1981. His father was for several years the anchor for NBC Nightly News so he comes by his investigating via heredity. He describes his upbringing in Brooklyn with a famous father as "liberal without the idiocy and conservative without the guns". He graduated from Columbia's School of Journalism before becoming a reporter. He was a co-winner of a George Polk award for reporting on US involvement in conflict-diamond mining. His biggest success came in 2017 with a non-fiction book The Hidden State: How the NSA Steals Elections which was not only a huge bestseller but also garnered for him a Pulitzer, as well as governmental scrutiny and a possible prison sentence.
Mitchell is less known to the American public but not to the people in her field. When she elected to leave The Guardian in England to become take on the job of Foreign Affairs correspondent, it was met with considerable surprise she would leave her previous position and some happiness that she was now part of the team. Her tenacity and her drive were already well known.
Together these two will join up to get involved in several matters that more than one government will not want known as well as a large number of trained killers who know how to put a story to bed in a different way.