Celeste Bott Email & Phone Number

Greater Chicago Area

• Writing at least two stories per day that reach thousands of readers while covering and tracking civil lawsuits and criminal cases in the state and federal courts in Illinois.• Meeting numerous daily deadlines while also working on long-term projects and features, maintaining excellent time management skills to juggle live court coverage with writing, legal research, tracking dockets, and on-the-ground reporting.• Collaborating with other reporters and teams across numerous other news wires to ensure the best coverage possible.• Extensive experience reporting on cases in the following areas of law: cybersecurity and privacy, white collar, antitrust, personal injury, medical malpractice, real estate, legal ethics and malpractice, securities, health care, employment, intellectual property, contracts and more. • Seeing cases through from their filing to trial, reporting on all stages of the case including discovery disputes, dismissal and summary judgment briefing and more.• Experience covering dozens of jury and bench trials in state and federal courts.• Working quickly and efficiently to cover breaking legal news in the state of Illinois and scoop competitors.• Consistently relied upon at Law360 for key appellate coverage at the Seventh Circuit, the Illinois Appellate Courts and the Illinois Supreme Court.• Building connections and relationships with attorneys, major law firms, law school deans and professors, court clerks and staff and other key stakeholders in the local legal industry to strengthen storytelling.• Evaluating and profiling Illinois law firms for awards and features such as our annual Powerhouse series.• Acting as an assigned mentor to young reporters new to Law360 and legal reporting.• In charge of putting together and editing a highly read weekly newsletter on litigation stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.• Tracking and covering Illinois legislation and political issues in Springfield that affect the practice of law in the state.

Greater St. Louis Area

• Covered national, state and local politics for the newspaper, in both the paper's Missouri Capitol bureau and the St. Louis City Hall bureau. • Coverage included the 2016 and 2018 elections, the brief tenure and ultimate resignation of ex-Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens, the bills and issues debated by both the Missouri Legislature and the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, and the protests against police brutality in the wake of Michael Brown's fatal shooting and the demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri.• Creator and key contributor to Tipping Point, a multi-part, award-winning series on blight in St. Louis.• Regularly hosted and appeared on the paper's podcast, Inside the Post-Dispatch.• Regularly appeared on Post-Scripts, a weekly segment at Fox 2 St. Louis, to provide political analysis.• Edited, supervised and mentored interns during their internships at the paper's Jefferson City capital bureau.• Balanced daily deadlines, breaking news, and live coverage of legislative hearings and sessions with long-term investigative projects and features that brought important issues to light, put pressure on key legislators to address problems identified by the reporting and prompted changes and debate at the legislative level.

Springfield, Illinois Area

• Covered the Illinois Legislature, the governor, and state agencies as all were faced with a record-setting budget impasse.• Was relied upon to work long hours into the night covering debates on bills considered by the Illinois legislature and break news quickly upon passage or defeat.• Wrote about bills from their introduction, to their passage in committee, to their approval by lawmakers and signature from Illinois' governor.• Covered the 2016 election, including numerous political rallies for President Donald Trump.

Washington D.C. Metro Area

• Wrote, reported and copy-edited longform stories for the monthly magazine.• Was part of a three-member team that sought to overhaul and modernize the publication's marketing strategy.• Revamped the magazine's social media management, writing and scheduling tweets and posts and boosting readership of its content and visitors to its website.

Lansing, Michigan Area

• Oversaw the publication of a daily 20-page newspaper serving not just the Michigan State community and student body but the greater East Lansing/Lansing area. • Hired, supervised and trained a staff of more than 50 student journalists, acting as a leader of the editorial, photography, and design desks. Also handled all payroll, scheduling/time off, and disciplinary actions if needed for that staff. • Edited every story, down to the photo captions, that appeared in the newspaper and on the State News website. • Conducted daily meetings with editors to plan upcoming publications, event coverage, photo shoots and multimedia production. • Created an entirely new filing and copy-editing process as the paper transitioned from broadsheet to tabloid for the first time since its founding more than 100 years ago.• Overhauled the process for training and onboarding student journalists and interns.• Created theme issues of the paper that still put out annually every year as of 2022. • Gave monthly presentations on the paper's plans and progress to the State News board of directors and executive staff.• While serving digital managing editor and editor-in-chief, the paper won the Society of Professional Journalists national award for Best All-Around Daily Student Newspaper for 2015 and a 2014 Online Pacemaker from the Associated Collegiate Press.

Lansing, Michigan Area

• Reported on all branches of Michigan state government and filed stories on multiple legislative elections.• Covered legislative committee hearings and reported on new bills filed and debated before those bodies. • Edited and put together a daily political newsletter for Gongwer, including its own updates and aggregated political clips from Michigan and national news outlets.

• Acted as an independent contributor analyzing and writing about state policy, including PAC funding for state universities.

Lansing, Michigan Area

• Reported environmental news for the Great Lakes Basin. • Acted as the outlet's social media manager, marketing stories on Twitter and other social media websites. • Conducted environment reporting research in the Communications Arts and Sciences field and presented that research at MSU's University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum.

Lansing, Michigan Area

• Reported on the state capital for 20+ Michigan newspapers.

Bachelor'S Degree, Journalism

Master’S Degree, Public Affairs Reporting

Education record