AP’s video products didn’t require stand-ups, so I only did them when a package deserved it—and when I could shoot solo without risking my gear or my dignity.
Features
Wildfires: Pope Valley, Grist Mill, Helen of Vacaville
Richmond Mural 12/17/20
More Audio Hosting
Berkeley Rep Podcast Series April 16, 2021
Stanford Republicans-AP Firing, May 24, 2021
The California Report hosting, August 27, 2019
Middle School Gym Class February 4, 2020 Gotta end with a kicker!
Berkeley Back-to-School Mom April 2, 2021
Chauvin Verdict Reax-Pastor April 21, 2021 — Live
Is J&J a Second-Rate Vaccine? April 26, 2021 — original idea and Q&A webpost
Variant Research-Mission February 2, 2021 — original idea
Chasing Wildfires September 2, 2020 — I’ve been fascinated by Craig Clements’ research for a while now. I hope it’s not too obvious in this interview that I’m a total fangirl. So while he wanted to explain the data analysis, I was more interested in the exciting meteorologist-as-cowboy stuff. I still love talking to scientists.
Shady Fire September 28, 2020 — I interviewed the mayor of Santa Rosa and KQED reporter Shannon Lin who talked to evacuees.
More Recent Radio Work
Here’s another long overdue post with my latest. Most of this got done from my bedroom closet-studio.
Two 2-ways on Rolling Blackouts
Michael Wara 8/15/20 — I’m proud of this one because it was all mine. I was solo on a weekend the morning after the rolling-blackouts so I had to book, edit, produce, and engineer this 2-way on my own. Late the evening before, I booked Wara for 6:15am. He recorded himself with Tape-a-Call. I synced the interview myself and cut it in time to air at 7:30am.
Severin Borenstein 9/7/20 — This one was more of a team effort. For both of these, I drew on the fact that I had covered the 2001 rolling blackouts when I was a baby reporter. My goal was to explain what happened and why, to listeners who didn’t remember back then, what was different to those who did, and how and why a regulatory agency and a private power monopoly work together to execute these outages.
Wildfires: LNU Featurettes and 2-ways 8/19-21/20
Day 1: Live from Vacaville and Helen the Pig — best sound
Day 2: Live from Calistoga Incident Command and Pope Valley — best 2-way
Day 3: Live on Forum and Grist Mill — best writing
Day Umpteen (9/2/20): Chasing Wildfires — I’ve been fascinated by Craig Clements’ research for a while now. I hope it’s not too obvious in this interview that I’m a total fangirl. So while he wanted to explain the data analysis, I was more interested in the exciting meteorologist-as-cowboy stuff. I still love talking to scientists.
Day 15 Billion of the 2020 Fire Season (9/28/20) — The Shady Fire blew through so I interviewed the mayor of Santa Rosa and KQED reporter Shannon Lin who talked to evacuees.
Covid Coverage
Oaklandish and Business Insurance (7/24/20) — What I remember about this interview is how defeated she sounded.
Bob Wachter (10/30/20) predicted the winter surge when San Francisco paused its reopening. Then my colleague Kevin Stark told me about the arrival of the vaccine on the same day (12/14/20) public health officials issued a dire warning about the coming hospital crunch.
Covid and McClymonds’ Warriors (7/21/20) — I miss doing regular field interviews!
And since we’re approaching a whole year of Covid, here’s the first story I ever reported on the coronavirus, back on January 27, 2020. I also interviewed a Wuhan native about shipping PPE to his hometown back in February. Here’s me being talking about the first lockdown on March 18, 2020. We knew so little and much of it was wrong. It makes my head hurt.
Miscellaneous stuff from the before-times:
Bay Area Freeway Naming Conventions 11/29/20
Presidential Candidates on Climate Change 3/2/20 Hear me rattle off the names of the Democrats all in one breath!
Supervised Injection Sites 9/18/19
Middle School Gym Class 2/4/20 Gotta end with a kicker!
We won a regional Murrow!
Our coverage of the Kincade Fire won in the Breaking News category. It was my week on-air in the mornings so I played a big part in it. That’s me hosting under Region 2/Large Market. I also helped explain how the fire started and celebrated the evacuees’ return. Mad credit to the reporters who contributed and to editor Ted Goldberg.
How I spent my shelter-in-place/work-/teach-cation
It was nice to be essential—for about a week! Positives: driving into downtown San Francisco and parking for free. Negatives: zero lunch options, being afraid of colleagues, sudden-onset hypochondria.
Soon I knew it was time to drag the show into remote production, to get everyone except the steadfast engineers out of the newsroom. Considering the challenges, we managed pretty well!
I miss ambi and light features. But I did pitch and produce this:
How a Hospital Chaplain Comforts Patients Without Hugs or Holding Hands
Here’s to a vaccine, re-opened schools, and big parties where everyone hugs and dances all night!
_________
Also, we won a regional Murrow! Our breaking coverage of the Kincaid Fire won in the Breaking News category. That’s me hosting under Region 2/Large Market. I also helped explain how the fire started, and celebrated along with the returning evacuees. Mad credit to the reporters who contributed and to editor Ted Goldberg.
Recent Radio Work
Here’s a long overdue post with my latest work in audio, mostly for KQED.
Orinda Shooting, live field reporting, 11/1/19 — I went live a lot that morning, starting at 5:30am. Here are some select hits: for The California Report statewide segment, for the local newscast on the hour, and on KQED’s call-in show, Forum.
Kincaid Fire Interviews, anchoring, 10/24/19 — I was filling in as morning anchor on the morning of the Kincaid fire. We busted out some of NPR newscasts at the top of the hour to fit in more local content and live interviews from the evacuation zone.
Kincaid Malfunction, 2way, 10/25/19 — I hosted this live interview during the local segment of Morning Edition.
Newscasts, anchoring, 10/28/19 and 10/30/19 — Again, two short local newscasts from KQED’s Kincaid Fire coverage. I like the celebratory sound in the second ‘cast.
The California Report, anchoring, 8/27/19 — The California Report is a statewide newscast for public radio stations across the state.
Nematodes, superspot, 11/12/19 — Another science nerd story. Maybe I was showing off a bit by pitching a story from one of the most remote and uninhabitable parts of the state.
Digital video at Timeline.com
A few years ago, I worked at the now-defunct Timeline.com, a startup dedicated to retelling episodes from history for online audiences. My friend Charlotte brought me on board as a video editor and producer. This was back when people still watched horizontal video on Facebook.
I wrote scripts and edited videos, managed freelancers, wrote a stylebook, copy edited and fact checked, cleared archive material, and pitched stories.
This one about the Port Chicago disaster was my favorite, because it was my own pitch and I got to write the text too:
I remember having a lively discussion with the editor of this piece about testing the Pill in Puerto Rico about whether his first edit was too salacious for this topic. What do you think?
I also enjoyed the lighter, character-driven pieces, because I learned about the lives of Kuldip Rae Singh, Brownie Wise, Gloria Richardson, Sessue Hayakawa, Sophie Scholl, Moms Mabley, Grace Halsell, Phyllis Diller, and Federica Montseny. Sadly, many of these videos were taken down and sold to an educational publisher.
R.I.P. Timeline.com and thanks for the free snacks.
More digital video for NBCBayArea
Day turns for NBCBayArea.com. Look what a difference a new template makes!
My improvised template was much harder to work with:
New and improved template from NBC HQ: