Madison Hopkins rejoined the newsroom in April 2023. Before returning, she was the health accountability reporter for The Kansas City Beacon, where she collaborated with ProPublica's Local Reporting Network to investigate Missouri's oversight of sheltered workshops for adults with disabilities.

Originally from Southern California, Madison moved to Chicago to earn her master's degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. She initially joined the Better Government Association in 2016, where she investigated Chicago's recycling program failures, the absence of regulatory enforcement at Illinois nuclear power plants and bureaucratic failures in Chicago's building code enforcement system that contributed to dozens of fatal fires.