KUER | NPR Utah
Utah is a place truly like no other. And I’ll always be grateful I first got to know it as a daily news reporter with KUER.
On paper, KUER’s Southwest News Bureau was located in St. George. But I was lucky to take my reporting all over the region and file many of my stories from the road.
SENT AWAY
In June 2020, I shifted into an investigative role at the station, focusing Utah’s ‘troubled-teen’ industry. It’s a loosely regulated network of private treatment programs that draws hundreds of millions of dollars and thousands of teenagers to the state every year.
Shortly thereafter, KUER joined forces with The Salt Lake Tribune and APM Reports, the investigative unit within American Public Media, to create Sent Away, an investigative reporting partnership focused on why the state has failed to ensure that the thousands of kids sent here are safe.
Our investigative, narrative podcast series releases in March 2022, and some of the standalone stories we released along the way helped change how Utah regulates these businesses during the 2021 legislative session.
A Girl, Her Hands Zip Tied, Was Forced To Sit In A Horse Trough At A Utah 'Troubled-Teen' Center
Utah Has Seen Abuse In ‘Troubled Teen’ Programs For Decades. Now, Momentum Slowly Builds For Change.
SOUTHWEST NEWS BUREAU
I first joined KUER in June 2019, when I moved to the desert city of St. George to open the station’s first “Southwest News Bureau.”
Of the hundred-odd stories I filed that year, there are two bodies of reporting of which I’m particularly proud.
The first was an investigation into Southern Red Sands, a contentious mining project outside the Southern Utah town of Kanab that many feared would jeopardize the water source the town — and to a lesser degree, Zion National Park — depend on. The reporting culminated in a local politician, who also worked for mining company, admitting he had lied about the project’s political backers. The mining project was ultimately abandoned and the the aquifer was permanently protected.
You can listen to two of the stories from that series below:
'If I Said It, I Was Lying': Kane County Commissioner Denies Saying Romney Invested In Sand Mine
The Burden Of Proof: Kane County Residents Worry Proposed Frac Sand Mine May Jeopardize Aquifer
The second was an enterprise story and subsequent multimedia piece about the impacts of the housing crisis in one of the country’s fastest-growing areas: Washington County, Utah. My reporting examined the rising number of unhoused students in the country school district and showed how, in the most extreme cases, the county’s most vulnerable families were resorting to itinerant living on public lands.
A Problem Just Out Of Sight: Homeless Students in Southwest Utah
The Gray Area
Both the mining and housing stories won national awards from the Public Media Journalists Association and regional awards from the Society of Professional Journalists chapters in Utah and the ‘Top of the Rockies.’