Read my story about the Texas freeze for SIERRA here.
After graduating from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, I moved home and took a job at The Park Record in Park City, Utah. Starting as the paper’s business editor in February 2008, I found my groove a couple months later when I took over the arts and entertainment section.
In my time as the A&E editor for the twice-a-week paper, I had the chance to cover all things Sundance, from Robert Redford’s annual press conference kicking off the film festival to the awards ceremony at the end. I got to interview filmmakers like the ones behind “Afghan Star,” a documentary about an American Idol spinoff in Afghanistan featuring girls and women who had spent their lives under Taliban rule.
Often, I found that the best entertainment stories were the ones you got when you took a step back and looked at the big picture, like how the Great Recession was thinning out the ranks of movie critics and making it harder for independent films to find acclaim and a wide audience, or how things like the passage of anti-gay legislation was threatening the future of Sundance.
Because Sundance is only a couple weeks a year, I had plenty of time to cover other stuff, too: community theater, gallery openings, concerts, restaurants. I hung out with one of the first female skydivers and chatted with an escapee of a polygamist sect. I drove around with a former ski instructor advocating for more wheelchair accessibility in Park City.
Before my time at The Record, I did internships at the CBS affiliate in Chicago and at the Tucson Citizen, a (sadly) now defunct newspaper in Tucson, Arizona. One of my favorite stories to report there was about a teenage girl who lived with cystic fibrosis. While she was waiting for a lung transplant, her high school marching band showed up on the lawn of the hospital to play her an impromptu concert.
There were also lots of feral cats and urban coyotes in Tucson.
My first story to ever get picked up by the wire was about how remote controls are the dirtiest items in hospitals.