Whitney Henry-Lester
Podcast Producer
About
Whitney is a podcast producer at KUOW. She helped develop some of KUOW's first podcasts, including How's Your Day? and Second Wave.
Whitney has a degree in film, but she has spent most of her career producing and editing audio stories. She has also worked with StoryCorps, The Third Coast International Audio Festival, 99% Invisible, and Transom.org.
She once ran an audio artists residency from her apartment in Lima, Peru.
Location: Tacoma
Languages: English, Spanish
Pronouns: she/they
Podcasts
Stories
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Ghost Herd
Part 6: The Reckonin'
Native Americans once owned these lands, and they still treat the Columbia Basin as their sacred home. We’ve all benefited from that taken land, but now corporations are the West’s new settlers. Meanwhile, Cody faces a federal judge and his tight-knit rural community. His sons start taking over what remains of the family’s vast operation and beat-up reputation.
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Ghost Herd
Part 5: The Bidding War
The Easterday empire is being broken apart. Some of the most valuable farmland in America is up for sale, and the billionaires are coming to town. The bidding war over water-rich lands shows the shift in how America farms.
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Ghost Herd
Part 4: The Crash
Cody's swindle comes crashing down, and it’s all thanks to Covid. When a giant meat operation discovers the truth about his ghost herd, they take aim at Cody.
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Ghost Herd
Part 3: The Gamble
Why would someone create a ghost herd? Behind Cody Easterday’s swindle was an even-bigger gambling habit on the futures market. That vice may have changed the price of American beef slapping down on your kitchen table. We also look at how all farmin’ is a gamble.
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Ghost Herd
Part 2: The Swindle
Cowboy Cody Easterday lies big, creating a “ghost herd” of 265,000 cattle that only exist on paper and bringing in hundreds of millions of investment dollars from companies including a meat-packing giant. It’s fraud on a massive scale. We examine how he carried it out.
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Ghost Herd
Part 1: The Empire Builders
Meet the Easterdays – ranching royalty rooted in the Columbia Basin in southeast Washington state. But behind the well-known family name hides a dark secret, concealed in spreadsheets and bum invoices, that’s eating away at their vast empire.
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The Blue Suit
A blue suit becomes history
The story behind the viral and historic blue suit that inspired this podcast.
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The Blue Suit
A record player is a time machine
The vintage Califone record player allows sound artist Paul Kikuchi to access and share songs that he inherited from his great-grandfather and other 78rpm records that were left behind by Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.
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The Blue Suit
A dictionary transforms a son's grief
After his father's death, Byron Au Yong turned to paper folding.
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The Blue Suit
A childhood stuffie goes missing
The Blue Suit's host, Shin Yu Pai, revisits an object from her own life.