Hello there! I’ve played many different roles in the journalism field: investigative reporter, television producer, newsroom leader, journalism educator, community engagement facilitator and program builder. My guiding lights are a passion for building trust, connecting communities, championing democracy and promoting critical thinking.

I’m putting those values into action as an award-winning senior instructor and director of the journalism master’s program at the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. I’ve led our effort to redesign our journalism master’s program, and oversee everything from admissions and cohort-building to funding and curriculum. I’m proud to have doubled enrollment while expanding opportunities for students from marginalized backgrounds, and pioneered new initiatives around community-focused storytelling and entrepreneurial thinking. 

I love teaching for many of the same reasons I love journalism: discovering and contextualizing information and telling a nuanced, engaging story for diverse audiences. One of my crowning achievements as an instructor is a 300-person, freshman-level online grammar class that regularly receives such ringing praise as “way more interesting than I thought it would be” and “surprisingly fun.” Ask me about semicolons. I can literally talk about them for an hour. You can check out the rest of my academic experience here.

Much of my journalistic philosophy is built upon insights I gained through The 32 Percent Project — a grant-funded research initiative I co-founded to understand what drives and disrupts trust in news and information. My research partner (and wife) Lisa Heyamoto and I traveled to public libraries across the country hosting community engagement workshops to gain ground-level insights. We presented our findings widely and enthusiastically, from conferences such as ONA to a forum on media and democracy in Delhi, India. One of our academic papers won the Best Paper award at IAMCR, and I continue building on the research through my work with the Catalyst Journalism Project.

As a reporter for The Sacramento Bee and The Modesto Bee newspapers, I produced investigative reports that held power to account and elevated community voices. My work provided citizens with information they needed to take on and eventually shut down a polluting factory that was sickening children at a neighborhood school. I worked closely with nurses, patients and union leaders to expose a decades-long pattern of patient mistreatment at a mental hospital in California. I uncovered public documents revealing a major housing fraud and charity scam in California that led then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to pass new restrictions to protect homebuyers. My work won awards from the Associated Press, California Newspaper Publishers Association and McClatchy Newspapers, and I was a finalist for the Livingston Award. Here’s a book chapter I recently wrote on investigative interviewing techniques.

While I enjoy being out in the field, some of my most rewarding experiences have been as an editor and newsroom leader — in the U.S. and abroad. I worked as an associate editor at Czech Business Weekly in Prague, Czech Republic, where I coached non-native English speakers from across Europe to produce clear, illuminating coverage of the 2008 financial crisis for a global audience. Back in the states, I served as executive producer at KVAL-TV, the CBS affiliate in Eugene. My responsibilities included assigning stories, coordinating live shots, editing scripts and helming the control booth during live broadcasts. I continue to put my broadcast skills to work through a popular audio storytelling and podcasting course I teach at UO.

My work across platforms and in entrepreneurial education has given me a deep understanding of the economics of  journalism. I have an MBA from the University of Oregon Lundquist College of Business, and have taught entrepreneurship and strategic storytelling at the undergraduate and MBA level.

I’m believe in the power of unions to make the workplace more equitable, and have served as faculty representative for United Academics Local 3209 AFL-CIO.

Last but most definitely not least, I’m a proud husband, father and neighborhood advocate. I volunteer at my daughters’ public Japanese-language immersion school, play guitar with passion (if not technique), voraciously consume podcasts and undertake home improvement projects that I only occasionally come to regret.

You can check out my resume here. My full academic CV is here. If you want to explore more of my work, I’m a regular speaker on issues of trust, democracy and the future of journalism. You can read, watch or listen to me expounding on these topics through the links below: