Photo by Parker Miles Blohm
I’m drawn to stories that have me genuinely confused and conflicted. I don’t see a point in pursuing a question if there isn’t a chance I’ll be knocked off balance by the answer.
These values have brought me face-to-face, again and again, with stories that bitterly divide Americans and cry out for sense-making and meaning-making: stories of homelessness, mental illness, addiction, policing, ideology, and immigration.
For the past several years, I’ve served as a senior fellow at USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism, coaching journalists through long-term investigative and narrative projects on these topics.
My most common advice is for reporters to lean into the complexity that confronts us out in the world, to look straight into murky areas that other journalists might leave out or paper over. These are the stories that audiences, drowning in discrete bits of information, are looking to us to help synthesize.
This philosophy guides my current work with the Seattle NPR station KUOW, where I lead an effort to produce “big swings" – deeply-reported audio documentaries that appear as serial podcasts and special broadcasts.
I work at every phase of production: developing pitches, tracking down sources and records, reporting in the field, mapping out story arcs, identifying themes, writing scripts, editing, scoring, and mixing. Many of my projects have involved creating and managing cross-newsroom partnerships between public radio stations and newspapers.
This builds on my prior work at the Seattle/Tacoma NPR station KNKX, where I helped launch the newsroom’s inaugural “special projects team,” developing, reporting, and producing some of the station’s highest-profile narrative podcasts and investigative series.
Before transitioning to audio and moving to the Pacific Northwest, I learned journalism as a newspaper reporter in my home state of New York, where I contributed to The Wall Street Journal and covered beats at Newsday. You can read about my journey to audio journalism here. My writing has also been published by NPR, The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Seattle Times, Harvard Public Health Magazine, and other outlets.
A lot of what keeps me grounded and motivated through long-term journalism projects I learned from long-distance running (marathon PR: 3:01:18) and a lifetime of practicing martial arts, from fencing to traditional Chinese styles. Journalism is a fallback career after I failed to make it as a guitarist in punk- and shoegaze-influenced bands back home in New York.