John Ryan

Reporter

About

John welcomes story ideas and feedback from listeners. Email him at jryan@kuow.org or call him at 206-543-0637. For secure, confidential communication, he's at 1-401-405-1206 on the Signal messaging app, or you can send snail mail (but don't put your return address on the outside) to John Ryan, KUOW, 4518 Univ. Way NE, Seattle, WA 98105.

Good thing John was a clumsy traveler.

Otherwise his cheap microcassette recorder wouldn't have fallen out of his pocket in an Indonesian taxi, a generous BBC stringer wouldn't have lent him some recording gear, and he wouldn't have gotten the radio bug. But after pointing a mic at rare jungle songbirds and gong-playing grandmothers for his first radio story, there was no turning back.

He spent several years freelancing for most of the major public radio news shows (as well as newspapers including Christian Science Monitor and Los Angeles Times). John also did an award-winning documentary for KUOW on the side from a day gig covering transportation at the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce.

In 2009, John moved back to Seattle become KUOW’s first investigative reporter after two exciting years covering avalanches, political intrigue and just about everything in between for KTOO, the NPR station in Alaska's capital city. He returned to Alaska for a 4-month stint in the Aleutian Islands in 2015 and won awards for KUOW and KUCB-Unalaska for his coverage of Arctic oil drilling from two states.

John’s stories have won multiple national awards for KUOW, including the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi awards for Public Service in Radio Journalism and for Investigative Reporting and national Edward R. Murrow and PRNDI awards for coverage of breaking news.

John is a shop steward of KUOW’s SAG-AFTRA newsroom union.

He believes democracy only works when journalism holds the powerful accountable for their words and actions.

To see more of John's past KUOW work, visit our archive site.

Stories