Since 2019, he has led a team of journalists for The Associated Press (AP) that covers news in all formats on race and ethnicity and their intersection with politics, health, criminal justice and other topics.
Before that, Gross worked as an editor on the AP’s regional editing desk in Chicago for 10 years. He helped lead police shooting coverage and was dispatched to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 to cover the unrest after a grand jury decided not to indict the white police officer who killed Michael Brown, a Black teenager.
While working on the regional editing desk, Gross pitched in with the Race and Ethnicity team and guided several multiformat projects that won awards, including ones on the Little Rock Nine and Red Summer. The Little Rock Nine project examined race 60 years after nine Black students tested the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1957 by enrolling at a Little Rock, Arkansas, high school that had been all White. The Red Summer project looked at attacks during 1919 in which hundreds of Black people died at the hands of White people and the impact on the communities where the violence occurred.Gross was a mentor from 2012 to 2017 with the National Association of Black Journalists’ Student Multimedia Project, where he helped oversee a newsroom restructuring that emphasized multiformat training for students.
He joined the AP in 2006 as a reporter in Kansas City, Missouri. Earlier in his career, he was a newspaper reporter at the Waterloo Courier in Iowa, The Kansas City Star and the Akron Beacon Journal in Ohio.
Gross, a native of Moberly, Missouri has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He resides in Chicago with his wife and two sons.