Sara Bernard

Multimedia Journalist

Seattle, WA

Audio producer, writer, photographer, globetrotter

Sara Bernard

Multimedia Journalist

Seattle, WA

Audio producer, writer, photographer, globetrotter

Featured
Podcast | The mental health crisis afflicting students and their teachers
The pandemic only made things worse. According to a recent U.S. Surgeon General report, depression and anxiety symptoms have doubled among youth across the world. Emergency room visits in the U.S. for suspected suicide attempts among adolescent girls are
Crosscut
Featured
Podcast | How a young, progressive Latino could vote Republican
In the months leading up to the midterm elections, one group of voters has received a lot of attention, across the country and in Washington state: Latino Americans. This group of voters has seen its influence grow in local and national elections in recen
Crosscut
Podcast | Deadly avalanches that made Pacific Northwest history
In the stormy winter of 1910, an avalanche struck two stalled trains in Wellington, a railroad outpost in Washington’s Central Cascades. Three days later, another one blanketed dozens of rail workers in the Canadian Selkirks. Both events remain the deadli
Cascade PBS News
Podcast | What has changed in Washington since the fall of Roe
When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the stage was set for abortion bans or restrictions in many states, as well as for a political groundswell from Americans who believe in a right to abortion and for uncertainty for those seeking abortions, th
Crosscut
Podcast | The effort to reform Washington prison culture
The Washington State Department of Corrections hopes Amend can help improve interactions among corrections officers and inmates and create better outcomes when the incarcerated are released. Listen to Crosscut Reports on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon or
Crosscut
Podcast | The gray areas of surveillance tech in WA police forces
As Crosscut reporter Brandon Block discovered, the laws that govern this kind of technology are limited, and vary from city to city. Listen to Crosscut Reports on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon or wherever you get your podcasts. Police and other city dep
Crosscut
Featured
This Changes Everything
A weekly exploration of the cultural, economic, and social impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, as told by the reporters covering the response to the virus in Seattle, Washington, the first epicenter of the outbreak in America. Hosted by Sara Bernard.
Radio
Podcast | What happened to sea monster sightings in the PNW?
Large creatures in the waters of the Northwest are depicted in Indigenous artworks from precolonial times, and frontier newspapers regularly carried tales of frightening sea creatures. The tales continued well into the 20th century. As recently as the 196
Crosscut
Podcast | Who really designed the Space Needle?
When the Space Needle rose quickly on the Seattle city skyline, the response was varied. Some loved it, some hated it. Some likened it to a flower blossoming, others said it resembled a mushroom cloud. The Cold War was on everyone’s mind. So was the futur
Crosscut
Featured
Dinh v Ride The Ducks
Trial Insider: Dinh v Ride The Ducks. An accident, its origins, and its aftermath. A production of Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore, and hosted by Sara Bernard. With court testimony, interviews, and archival sound, this podcast pieces together the legal and historical landscape that surrounded the fatal collision between a Ride the Ducks vehicle and a charter bus on September 24, 2015 in Seattle.
Radio
After treatment, young adults often face homelessness
[Scroll down for animated audio] Patrick, who asked that his real name not be used, had experienced homelessness with his family as a child, but this was his first time staying in a youth shelter. “Actually I felt fine about it when I first got there,” he said, “and then it got progressively scarier for a while.”
Radio
Featured
Safe Consumption Part I: The Debate
In January 2017, Seattle and King County made national headlines: They announced their intentions to build the first two supervised consumption sites in the U.S. as a way to help combat the opioid crisis. The sites, also known as Community Health Engagement Locations (CHELs), safe consumption sites, or heroin injection sites, depending on whom you ask, are places where people can inject or consume illicit drugs legally and under medical supervision.
Radio
Featured
Safe Consumption Part II: The Site
The closest supervised consumption site to Seattle—and the first one built in North America—is located on the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, British Columbia. It's called Insite, and was created in 2003 in response to an overdose and HIV transmission crisis there in the late 1990s. Because it's the first and the closest, and has about 15 years of operation and data behind it, lots of people in the Seattle area look to Vancouver for an example of what works, or what doesn't—again, depending on whom you ask.
Radio
Featured
Safe Consumption Part III: The Opposite of Addiction
As Seattle moves forward with piloting its first supervised consumption site—now likely to be housed in a mobile van, not a building—the fierce debate roars on. Although many people on both sides of the issue are saying the exact same thing, if you listen for a while, there's a fundamental difference that emerges.
Radio
Featured
Martin Luther King’s County
Seattle, Washington is the county seat of King County—Martin Luther King, Jr. Some locals already know that their county is named for the civil rights leader; others don't. But even those who are aware of the name probably don't know much about the long, difficult journey to make this the only jurisdiction in the entire country named for Dr.
Radio
Featured
Rape Culture in the Alaskan Wilderness
One night a few years ago, when Jane was 13, a man she’d grown up with stumbled into the room she shared with her two sisters in Tanana, Alaska, a tiny village northwest of Fairbanks, and climbed on top of her. He was stumbling drunk and aggressive. “He tried getting into my clothes,” she recalls.
The Atlantic
Photography Writing

I'm an award-winning multimedia journalist and audio producer with a huge appetite for audio news and long-form narrative. For the past seven-plus years, my focus has been podcasts. After several years as a staff writer for Seattle Weekly, I produced and hosted a weekly, sound-rich, deeply reported narrative podcast for that news outlet called "Seattleland." In 2019, I produced another narrative podcast for a law firm here in Seattle -- "Trial Insider: Dinh v Ride the Ducks," a six-episode story about a trial and its context; find it wherever you get podcasts. I then helped launch the podcast department from scratch at Cascade PBS in Seattle, which now has four active podcasts along with several more in its archive. Among others, I launched and produced "This Changes Everything," a podcast about the events that transform society (https://crosscut.com/podcast/changes-everything or wherever you listen). The first season explores the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic; the second, the movement to defund police; the third, public education in a pandemic. All three seasons have won awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and/or Best of the West. These days, as Senior Podcast Producer at Cascade PBS, I produce and co-host a newsroom-focused show called Northwest Reports (formerly Crosscut Reports, which also consistently wins SPJ awards), produce a show about Pacific Northwest history (Mossback), and help to mix audio and support production for Your Last Meal, an award-winning food podcast, among other projects.

Before all this, I was a fellow at Grist.org, a staff writer and multimedia producer at Edutopia magazine, and a freelance reporter and avid international traveler. I grew up in upstate New York and the San Francisco Bay Area, studied abroad in Toulouse, France, and spent several years freelancing, traveling, and volunteering in Thailand, Vietnam, India, France, England, Peru, Ecuador, Haiti, and Nicaragua before obtaining a master's degree at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and moving to Seattle.

As a writer, radio reporter, photographer, and web producer, I've fallen pretty hard for the myriad possibilities of multimedia storytelling. I've reported, produced, edited, voiced, and polished long-form audio documentaries. I spent a year reporting part-time for Crosscurrents on KALW 91.7 FM in San Francisco and a summer reporting for the Alaska Public Radio Network. I've produced radio pieces for broadcast on KQED’s The California Report, KUOW in Seattle, the National Radio Project’s Making Contact, and KALX 90.7 FM in Berkeley, along with many audio slide shows and add-ons for news outlets and nonprofit organizations. I've shot and edited videos, mapped data, and built stories using a variety of software platforms and CMS systems including Creatavist, Drupal, and Wordpress.

In addition to Seattle Weekly and Edutopia, I've written for Grist, Wired, The Atlantic, Crosscut, VIA, Bay Nature, Afar, Ode, Yoga Journal, Adirondack Life, Change.org, KQED’s MindShift, and The Bold Italic, among other publications, about education, travel, food, health, science, art, social justice, and the environment. I'm passionate about the power of high-integrity media to inform and inspire… and intensely curious about pretty much everything.

Sara Bernard

About

Sara Bernard