Sara Bernard

Multimedia Journalist
Seattle, WA
Writer, audio producer, photographer, globetrotter

About

Sara Bernard

I'm a multimedia journalist and audio producer with a huge appetite for long-form narrative. Most recently, my focus has been podcasts. After several years as a staff writer for Seattle Weekly, I produced and hosted a weekly narrative podcast for that news outlet called "Seattleland." In 2019, I produced another narrative podcast for a law firm here in Seattle -- "Trial Insider: Dinh v Ride the Ducks," a six-episode story about a trial and its context; find it wherever you get podcasts.

I then helped launch the podcast department at Cascade Public Media in Seattle, which now has four active podcasts along with several more in its archive. Among others, I launched and produced "This Changes Everything," a podcast about the events that transform society (https://crosscut.com/podcast/changes-everything or wherever you listen). The first season explores the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic; the second, the movement to defund police; the third, public education in a pandemic. All three seasons have won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and/or Best of the West. These days, as Senior Podcast Producer at Cascade Public Media, I produce and co-host a newsroom-focused show called Crosscut Reports, story edit a show about Pacific Northwest history (Mossback), and help to mix audio and support production for Your Last Meal, an award-winning food podcast.

Before all this, I was a fellow at Grist.org, a staff writer and multimedia producer at Edutopia magazine, and a freelance reporter and avid international traveler. I grew up in upstate New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, studied abroad in Toulouse, France, and spent several years freelancing, traveling, and volunteering in Thailand, Vietnam, India, France, England, Peru, Ecuador, Haiti, and Nicaragua before obtaining a master's degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and moving to Seattle.

As a writer, radio reporter, photographer, and web producer, I've fallen pretty hard for the myriad possibilities of multimedia storytelling. I've reported, produced, edited, voiced, and polished long-form audio documentaries. I spent a year reporting part-time for Crosscurrents on KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and a summer reporting for the Alaska Public Radio Network. I've produced radio pieces for broadcast on KQED’s The California Report, KUOW in Seattle, the National Radio Project’s Making Contact, and KALX 90.7 FM in Berkeley, along with many audio slide shows and add-ons for news outlets and nonprofit organizations. I've shot and edited videos, mapped data, and built stories using a variety of software platforms and CMS systems including Creatavist, Drupal, and Wordpress.

In addition to Seattle Weekly and Edutopia, I've written for Grist, Wired, The Atlantic, Crosscut, VIA, Bay Nature, Afar, Ode, Yoga Journal, Adirondack Life, Change.org, KQED’s MindShift, and The Bold Italic, among other publications, about education, travel, food, health, science, art, social justice, and the environment. I'm passionate about the power of high-integrity media to inform and inspire… and intensely curious about pretty much everything.