I was a member of the KPFA News Department from 1999-2010 . I have a BA in Economics from Fordham University in the Bronx, NY, and a law degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. I did not become a lawyer, going instead into legal publishing and then into journalism. Legal education is good training for investigative reporting and I am capapable of dissecting bureaucratic reports and legal issues; I am quite at home interviewing a lawyer.
During this decade, I also reported frequently for Free Speech Radio News (http://fsrn.org) and still produce programs for Women's International News Gathering Service (http://wings.org) as well independently for the internet. See Broadcaster At-Large at http://radio4all.net/
My broad areas of interest are: altermative economics; the impact of science and technology on our heath and civil liberties; how peak oil and the long term energy crisis will affect our lives; and environmental factors affecting public health. But I don't consider myself to have a beat. A lot of things interest me and I thrive on variety. I am also a sports fan who wrote a baseball blog, called Down the Left Field Line: Life, Baseball & Eric Byrnes for four years. I am interested in that place were the game intersects with larger societal concerns, a la Dave Zirin. (But you can talk to me about batting averages, ERA, and why Albert Pujols signed with the Angels, too).
Despite my presence on WINGS and the fact that I consider myself a straight ally of LGBTs, I hate ID politics, and prefer to stay away from most stories that are rooted in race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, religion, etc. (I have covered Prop 8, but I look at it as a civil rights and constitutional issue rather than as a "gay" issue).
I also have no use for the touchy, feely human interest story. Ordinary people serve as an illustration of a larger issue for me; they are not the point of the story. E.g. Several years ago, I did a story on an emerging AIDS drug and I interviewed one patient for whom the new drug was working and another for whom it was not. My editor was pleased that I had included the patients because she felt that this was what community radio was about. I included them to show that the drug was only helpful for some patients and was not a universal cure for AIDS. The story was built around what doctors and scientists had to say about the drug.
Likewise, I have no use for ambience for the sake of ambience, and I believe you can have fine documentaries that don't have music. (I've done several). Although I suppose that I will always do some audio work and am starting to get involved with video with the help of my videographer husband and occasional journatistic partner, David Watson, I prefer writing. I expect any stories I do through Spot.us to be centered around a written article, with audio or video secondary. I am coming to enjoy writing more because I don't have to waste my time with the "sound-rich" garbage I run up against. For me to be "sound-rich" means more comments by the people I have interviewed and less of my narration, rather than the sound of a gas pump in a story on energy prices or the sound of boots crunching in the snow as voters go to an early Presidential primary or caucus on a winter's day. If you need those kinds of sound effects with your news, you are not my audience. And if you are not my audience, you are missing something good, but that's your problem, not mine.
I am not your typical community journalist. As one colleague apty put it, I am a policy wonk reporter. Let me talk to the experts! My idea of community journalism is not about letting ordinary community members have the microphone just because they are ordinary people. It's about passing on the community what it needs to know to survive and thrive. The people who have that information may indeed be ordinary community members. They also may be people halfway around the world who are prominent in their professions if not household names. They may or may not be in Sacramento or Washington. They may be people of color; they may be white. They may be men or women. When it comes to looking for the truth, I want to feel free to talk to whomever may have the truth. Things like the race, gender or location of the person with the pertinent information should not signify.
I am also not into war reporting. We have enough people covering the bullets and bombs. I am more interested in the stories that are hidden behind the war coverage, e.g. the Active Denial System, a form of "non-lethal" weapon, which is being developed in a commercial form as well as a military one. Will it be turned against peaceful protesters? Now that we have the OWS Movement, and the poklice brutality that has been broadcast all over the Internet, the militarization of the police here is a major concern.
