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Jim Gates

Senior Editor

About

As Senior Editor Jim heads up the development of podcasts for KUOW’s AudioShop and helps guide reporters and producers through their stories. He helped develop KUOW’s daily news podcast Seattle Now and currently oversees THE WILD with Chris Morgan. Other podcasts he oversaw and edited include Second Wave, Battle Tactics for Your Sexist Workplace and How to Be a Girl which was nominated for a Peabody Award. Jim developed KUOW’s popular community story telling project Local Wonder where listeners ask questions about their community and then vote on the stories that they want KUOW reporters to cover.

Jim helped to oversee and develop one of public radio’s first investigative reporting units at KUOW with the mission to provide in-depth coverage of issues that affect Washington and the Puget Sound Region. Jim was the fill-in news director and led the breaking news coverage on several major stories.

Prior to coming to KUOW, Jim worked as an editor on such national shows as NPR’s Day to Day and Marketplace. Jim helped develop and launch the weekly magazine show Weekend America where he directed the live broadcast and edited feature stories. He started his public radio career as a volunteer at NPR member station KPCC in Los Angeles. Jim kept showing up at the station and eventually they actually started paying him. Jim moved to national programming when he joined the staff of The Savvy Traveler in 2000 as producer of the interview and listener segments.

Jim’s career in story telling began when he was a television writer on several sitcoms (a skill that is oddly applicable to public radio). He was on the writing team of The Discovery Channel’s first fiction show Animal Rescue Kids which won two Genesis Awards from the Human Society of the United States.

Location: Seattle

Language: English

Pronouns: he/him/his

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

Podcasts

Stories

  • Ghost Herd Logo FINAL
    Crime

    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.

  • Ghost Herd Logo FINAL
    Crime

    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.

  • caption: Paul Kikuchi next to the Califone in the Panama Hotel Tea Room
    Arts & Life

    Califone

    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.

  • caption: Glass orbs glow in Etsuko Ichikawa's Poems of Broken Fireflies.
    Arts & Life

    Vitrified Glass

    In a small clear box, Etsuko Ichikawa keeps a small piece of vitrified glass that was given to her on a tour of the Hanford nuclear site.

  • caption: Tomo and his favorite miso.
    Arts & Life

    Miso

    Tomo Nakayama usually puts his creative energy into his harmonious music. But when the pandemic hit, he found a new outlet: cooking.

  • caption: Anida Yoeu Ali, The Red Chador, Paris 2015 Performance.
    Arts & Life

    Red Chador

    A chador garment worn by some Muslim women is usually black. Not Anida Yoeu Ali's. Her chador is red and sparkly.