Washington Newspaper Publishers Association: Recent Episodes
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Interviews with industry leaders, writers and editors who have distinguished themselves in the field of journalism.
Rajah Bose is a freelance photographer who covered the murder of four University of Idaho students at their off-campus home for the New York Times, and he talks about how that assignment affected him. Also, inspired by Robert Frank's 1959 classic photo book The Americans, he recently took a photo trip around America to distill the nature of the nation today.
Ron Chew is a Chinese American and worked as a reporter in Seattle's International District. He covered the brutal Wah Mee murders on Feb. 19, 1983 and talks about how coverage of that crime teaches important lessons for journalists working today. He also talks about writing: what makes it powerful and what doesn't.
Here's the recording of our Aug. 11 open discussion on the proposed online-only membership proposal.
Amber D. Dodd joined The Spokesman-Review and The Black Lens as the Racial-Equity Reporter in June 2021. The position centers on the lives, history and narratives of people and communities of color. Here she talks about ways to approach race in reporting.
In this WNPA podcast, Executive Director Fred Obee and host Mike Dillon talk about the rise and fall and rise again of hate groups in Washington and what small town newspapers can do to start lifting the veil on hate in their communities.
Leah Sottile is a freelance journalist who began her career at the Cheney Free Press and the Inlander in Spokane. Today, she is a freelance writer whose features, profiles, investigations and essays have been featured by the Washington Post, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, California Sunday Magazine, Outside, The Atlantic, Vice and several others. In this podcast, she talks about her investigations of far right activists and what she has learned in that pursuit.
Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Jacqui Banaszynski spent 30-some years as a reporter and filed stories from all seven continents, including Antarctica. Her 1988 Pulitzer Prize winning story, "AIDS in the Heartland," followed a gay farm couple from diagnosis to death. In this podcast, Jacqui talks about how she approached that story. She adds that reporters should always be on the lookout for events that lend themselves to good story telling.
In this interview, Mark Dowie talks about muckraking, investigative reporting, the current state of the profession and how the community newspaper at Point Reyes in California was reacquired to better serve the community.
In this podcast, Shawn talks about how he got his start at a little weekly newspaper, his coverage of a beating death by police, how to find stories in unexpected places and how to incorporate fiction writing techniques in real world journalism.
A conversation with investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize finalist Les Zaitz, who retired from his job at a daily newspaper and purchased a tiny weekly in Eastern Oregon. Les argues that high quality journalism is the answer to declining readership. He urges reporters to make a lot of use of the public records act to research stories, and he thinks revenues from his website will come mainly from subscriptions, not ads. Listen to Les as he describes how a relentless focus on high quality, local journalism can save community newspapers.
A conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Eli Sanders, Associate Editor of The Stranger, Seattle's alternative weekly newspaper. His powerful, prize-winning narrative about a tragic crime in south Seattle elicited this comment from Ronnie Agnew, a 2012 Pulitzer judge: "I've never read a court story like The Bravest Woman in Seattle--never in 28 years of journalism."
In this episode, Eli talks about how he approached that story, why he likes a long-form, narrative approach and also discusses the value of data-driven journalism that can illuminate everyday events in our communities.