Ode to a Grecian journ(alist). Family looms large in this episode with Joanna Kakissis (@joannakakissis), a correspondent in Athens for National Public Radio, whose Greek parents instilled in her the importance of their culture from a young age. She made a mark early in her career as part of a Pulitzer finalist newspaper reporting team before returning to her roots in Greece where she has reported for more than a decade.

Countries featured: Turkey, USA, Greece

Publications featured: The News & Observer, Boston Globe, Time magazine, The New York Times, NPR

Joanna discusses growing up as the only Greeks in small town North Dakota (4:43), her trajectory from college to NPR (16:12), her newspaper coverage of a hurricane in North Carolina that taught her not to exoticize her subjects (23:00), why she took a risk to cover the Athens Olympics for the Boston Globe and became a freelance foreign correspondent (28:46), her broader European coverage (35:00), a story that got away about a Syrian doctor in Germany who killed the piece for fear for his family (38:58), her series for NPR on Uighurs in Turkey (44:28) and the lightning round (54:45).

Here are links to some of the things we talked about:

Joanna talks about covering the European migrant crisis - https://n.pr/3kAnokS

Part 1 of Joanna’s Uighur in Turkey series - https://n.pr/32GhJ6T

Part 2 - https://n.pr/3kw8X1e

Part 3 - https://n.pr/3eYpDxg

NPR’s Radiolab - https://bit.ly/36BmsaX

NPR’s Rough Translation podcast - https://n.pr/2ZXvzRo

NYT’s The Jungle Prince of Delhi - https://nyti.ms/39hXIUR

NYT Cooking mapo tofu recipe - https://nyti.ms/2IAUIuP

Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers - https://amzn.to/2UpGXSm

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Music: LoveChances (makaihbeats.net) by Makaih Beats

From: freemusicarchive.org

CC BY NC