John Ryan
ReporterYear started with KUOW: 2009
KUOW environment reporter John Ryan 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 professional 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 then freelanced for shows such as All Things Considered, Living on Earth, Marketplace and The World. He also continued his print career by reporting for newspapers including the Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times and Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce.
In 2009, John moved back to Seattle after two exciting years covering avalanches, political intrigue and just about everything in between for KTOO FM, the NPR station in Alaska's capital city.
John has won national awards for KUOW as a freelancer (check out "As the Sound Churns") and now as a staff reporter, including the Society of Professional Journalists' Sigma Delta Chi awards for Public Service in Radio Journalism and for Investigative Reporting. He believes democracy only works when journalism holds the powerful accountable for their words and actions.
To see more of John's KUOW portfolio, visit our current site.
In addition to the stories below, John's KUOW stories from September 2012 and before are archived here.
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A plume of black smoke stretched across South Seattle on Tuesday night as a fire burned on a barge of scrapped cars on the Duwamish River.It was a… -
With China no longer importing many recyclable materials, recycling programs up and down the West Coast are in turmoil.Twenty-two cities in western… -
An endangered killer whale has gone missing and is presumed dead, but it's not the only orca in trouble in Washington waters.Eight local orcas have died… -
The world's biggest cargo ships, some a quarter-mile long, could be docking regularly near downtown Seattle before long.After four years' study, the Army… -
Complaints have poured in over the yellow, green and orange bikes that have sprouted like mushrooms across Seattle, yet 74 percent of Seattleites have a… -
Washington state’s electric vehicle law is being widely ignored, according to a new report.Friday is the deadline set by a decade-old law that requires… -
Tribal leaders on both sides of the border said Canada's purchase of the Trans Mountain pipeline would not weaken their opposition to the pipeline's… -
Two Canadian provinces’ feud over an oil pipeline could boost gasoline prices and oil tanker traffic here in Washington state.British Columbia has been… -
If you take legal or illegal drugs, or even flush them down the toilet unused, there's a good chance they'll wind up in Puget Sound.Now there may be… -
They're not the biggest political contributions in the state's history, but they're up there.Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen says he has written a…
