About

I’m an award-winning writer and editor with a passion for shaping stories and a deep interest in how audiences consume information online. I’m currently an editor at RSM, where I focus on thought leadership content for the industries of manufacturing, financial services and technology.

Before this role, I worked for nearly four years as a reporter at the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska’s largest news outlet. There, I covered business, the economy, and general assignments. Previously, I worked at the Orange County Register, the defunct Los Angeles Register, the Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle, and elsewhere. I’m based in Chicago.

My reporting has taken me many places, including a slaughterhouse in Illinois, tent cities at Occupy Portland, the Arctic, Venice Beach, Kodiak Island, and doorsteps where I was not wanted.

I’ve investigated loopholes for small government contractors with questionable track records, shady for-profit colleges, and segregation in a California school district. I was a researcher for the award-winning Maytag Project, which used a unique approach to community engagement and data journalism to take a look at what happened to workers in an Illinois town years after its Maytag factory closed.

In Alaska, I wrote about marijuana, the state recession, shipping, retail, tourism, fishing, and more. I covered the 2018 governor’s race, the big Nov. 30, 2018, earthquake, and my own newspaper’s journey into and out of bankruptcy. I once got to begin a story with the lede, “Consider the hagfish.” (Google “hagfish” if you are unfamiliar.) 

I have many obsessions, but a particular passion for stories about business, the economy, and labor, and any story with a strong sense of place. I also have a master’s degree from the Columbia Journalism School, where I was a fellow in the selective Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism.

I hail from the cornfields of Illinois, where I grew up just outside of Chicago. I love redwoods, Gonzo journalism, music, Spanish, travel, and my deaf cat. Neil Young and Tom Petty fangirl. Raised on the records of the 60s and 70s but have since branched out.