Raquel’s first love was radio, and she spent six years working as a producer and reporter for National Public Radio, local public stations and commercial radio. Four years of daily field recording and hourly deadlines honed her technical skills and her writing voice. She’s proud of her freelance work for NPR’s newsmagazines, On the Media, The World, Studio 360 and Marketplace.
She learned how to shoot and edit video at Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she produced a half-hour news magazine about religion which won a 2007 Student Emmy. She worked part-time at KGO Radio and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat throughout grad school. She also freelanced short, non-narrated features to Current TV and helped cover the election of the first indigenous president in Bolivia for the documentary series Frontline/World.
Raquel also found herself drawn to good old-fashioned newspaper reporting. After several months on contract with AP’s Los Angeles bureau, she landed a full-time job with AP, where she holds down the desk every evening, covers breaking news and reports features when time allows. She has been sent to cover the Sundance Film Festival and the “Lost Boys” of the fundamentalist Mormons in Southern Utah.
Raquel has trained Youth Radio’s at-risk teens and the Press Democrat’s veteran journalists on broadcast writing and multimedia thinking. 
She is a problem-solver – the person in the newsroom who people go to for techinical help and the first to agitate for a better, faster way to get things done.
She brings a natural curiosity and enthusiasm to her work and still gets irrationally excited about breaking news and telling good stories.
She has the necessary skills to contribute real reporting to a changing media landscape:
- wire service speed combined with with public radio insight,
- a track record of generating stories on a beat, off the news and on the ground and
- experience gathering audio, shooting video in the field and editing multimedia projects on deadline.