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John Ryan

Good thing KUCB's fill-in reporter John Ryan was a clumsy traveler.

Otherwise his cheap microcassette recorder wouldn't have fallen out of his pocket in an Indonesian taxi, a generous BBC stringer wouldn't have lent him some professional recording gear, and he wouldn't have gotten the radio bug. But after pointing a mic at rare jungle songbirds and gong–playing grandmothers for his first radio story, there was no turning back.

In the past 15 years, he's freelanced for NPR News, Marketplace, the Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times. After working as a transportation reporter at the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce, he got his first job in radio (and the Alaska bug) at KTOO-Juneau. For the past six years, he's been a reporter at NPR station KUOW-Seattle, where he's won regional and national awards for investigative reporting.