Work Samples

Voiced Audio Pieces

These are some of my favorite scripted radio pieces I’ve reported. I’m proud of my radio stories when they weave together a range of voices and scenes and maybe even have a line or two of writing that makes me chuckle. And some good music never hurts every now and then.

  • The Free Box is an iconic part of Telluride. It’s a place for people to leave and take used-but-still-usable items. If you’re lucky, you can find all sorts of treasures from skis to stainless steel pans to winter coats to the perfect book. So, there was a lot of uncertainty when word got around that the Telluride Town council would be discussing the future of the Free Box in mid-2021. Ahead of that discussion, I had a blast talking to current and former locals and digging through archival material to produce this piece looking at the history of the iconic Telluride institution. Listen here.

  • This is a pretty random piece to highlight, but it’s still one of my favorites. I produced it amid what felt like unprecedented motor vehicle traffic passing through Telluride during the summer of 2020—when flights were still impacted by the pandemic. I love this piece because I feel like it’s the ideal newscast feature story. It starts with some colorful vignetts to outline a problem, pulls out to a wider public policy view, and looks at what local officials are doing to possibly address the problem down the line. And there are some great moments with sound throughout it all. It’s a news story with a story arc in the best sense, and it still makes me smile. Listen here.

  • Reporting has taken me to some amazing places, but one of the coolest was the night shift at the Telluride Ski Resort. I got to shadow some of the groomers who work overnight to prepare runs for the next day’s skiers and snowboarders. Preparing this piece was its own sort of marathon, not only in terms of reporting—of course I stayed on from late night through the next day’s opening—but also in terms of logging and editing hours of audio from a night’s-worth of recording. This piece at times has a bit of a surreal feel, cutting between scenes with a dreamlike fade, but I think it’s fitting. After all, what’s more dreamlike that traversing a snow-covered mountain at 4 a.m. in a massive snowcat that’s going up the same slopes that you only know from skiing down? Listen here.

  • This piece for Marketplace focused on a local affordable housing development in Telluride, CO aiming to be carbon neutral. It was a great opportunity to dive into a local project that our KOTO listeners had been very focused on and expand the conversation to think about lessons the work may have for others concerned about climate change and affordable housing across the U.S. Listen here.

  • I was thrilled when The World agreed to pick up this piece, which began when I learned Telluride would be flying the International Flag of Planet Earth along its Mainstreet as part of the 2022 Earth Day celebrations. The idea of the Earth having its own flag felt so intriguing. I was curious to learn the flag’s history and what others thought of it. Listen here.

Non-narrated Audio Pieces

I have a special love for non-narrated audio stories. They can be hard because all I can work with is what others have said. I can’t write myself out of a hole or add many new ideas. But they also have a purity and puzzle-like quality that I never get over. I like that I can fade out as the journalist and let the subjects of these pieces tell their stories in their own words.

  • This is one of my favorite pieces I’ve ever done. I produced it around the time of what would have been the annual Telluride Bluegrass Festival, but, because of COVID-19, it was cancelled. This was also in the weeks after George Floyd’s murder, when so many people were reassessing their understandings of race in the U.S. So, to bring a local angle to that national conversation, I decided to look into the African and African American history of Bluegrass. This piece also won a 2021 regional Edward. R. Murrow award for Excellence in Sound. Listen here.

  • One of my biggest challenges reporting in Telluride was that about a third of the community is Spanish-speaking immigrants, but I didn’t speak Spanish; I consistently felt that my journalism wasn’t reflecting the full range of life in the community. One way I tried to address that was by collaborating with a local nonprofit, Tri County Health Network, to produce this series telling the stories of some of those community members in both Spanish and English. Producing this series was an invaluable lesson for me in the importance of collaborating with organizations beyond a newsroom to help tell more expansive, diverse stories. Listen here.

  • While in Telluride, I heard about the historic 2001 Blues and Brews music festival that went ahead just days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. From what I head from locals who were there, those days of of music were some of the most memorable of their lives. So, I was overjoyed and honored when I was able to put together this piece combining my own interviews with gorgeous archival audio to tell the story of that unforgettable weekend. Listen here.

  • One of my first radio gigs after college was interning with the public radio stars, the Kitchen Sisters, in their San Francisco office on Kearny Street. I spent most of that time logging, editing, and playing around with hours of audio they had collected at a gathering on Al Gore’s Tennessee family farm. It was a dreamlike opportunity. I was one of the first to go through the raw audio, and we weren’t quite sure what the final piece would look like. So I was able to listen to countless interviews conducted by these radio legends to hear their kind, curious, stirring style of questioning and try out different ways to edit and score sections to see how it could all fit together. I couldn’t have asked for a better welcome to the world of radio storytelling. Listen here.