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.
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Twice a day, like clockwork, people release balloons around the world at the same time. These balloons are scientific tools, and the people releasing them are meteorologists.
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Even with vacancies, most Seattle shelters don't let families stay right away. A system designed to alleviate homelessness has resulted in a bottleneck that leaves families on the streets for longer. -
In Seattle — one of the nation's wealthiest cities — homelessness has surged over the past decade. More people are now homeless in Seattle than anywhere except New York City, Los Angeles or Las Vegas. -
Workers at U.S. oil refineries die on the job about three times as often as their counterparts in Europe. When accidents do kill American workers, the companies they work for rarely pay a heavy price.
