Newspaper Alum is happy to report that it didn’t take long for Kristen Millares Young, [See Biography ] a former business and metro reporter at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer before it folded in 2009, to land back on her feet. Since 2010, she’s freelanced on the National and Investigative desks for The New York Times and received a fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley’s Knight Digital Media Center.
In 2009, she co-founded InvestigateWest, an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to the craft of investigative and narrative journalism, focusing on the Pacific Northwest and the Western regions of the United States. In addition to her new journalism platforms, Young has been the recipient of research, reporting and travel grants from National Public Radio charter member station KUOW-FM 94.9 and Harvard University. Since 2011, The Graduate School of the University of Washington honored her writing with a Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Fellowship, a Teaching Assistantship, along with an in-depth author profile on their website, the “Most Likely to Be on the NYT Best-Seller List” Award and honorable mention for the Richard J. Dunn First Year Teaching Award.
Like so many gifted journalists yearning to expand their horizons, Young has completed her first novel, Subduction, and is now hoping to secure an editor and publisher. Subduction tells the story of an unethical anthropologist who begins an affair with informants on the Makah Indian Reservation, an old whaling village in Neah Bay, Washington. In explaining the literary symbolism of the novel, Young says, “Earth’s inexorable and violent metamorphosis through subduction serves as a central metaphor for the cultural, sexual and emotional conflict between Claudia, the anthropologist, and Peter, her lover.’’
Young launched her journalism career at Time Magazine; later served tours of duty with The Miami Herald, and Buenos Aires Herald as a metro, business and feature reporter. From 2004 through 2009, she reported for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where she uncovered waste and corruption at the Port of Seattle that cost taxpayers millions of dollars. Her dogged reporting exposed fraudulent contracting and procurement irregularities at the port, which triggered corporate and governance structures reforms, including an overhaul of its ethics policies.
Along with her investigative reporting, Young was retail reporter at the Post-Intelligencer, tracking companies like Amazon.com, Costco Wholesale Corp., Starbucks Corp., Nordstrom, Inc., while monitoring the real estate market, reporting on market volatility and writing a weekly small and minority business feature column.
It was at the Post-Intelligencer, where Young became friends with Homa Dorothy Parvaz, her colleague, who in 2011 was kidnapped in Syria while reporting on the Arab Spring for Al Jazeera. Young became principal organizer of the Free Dorothy Parvaz campaign, a campaign that led to Parvaz’s freedom when Iranian authorities released her on May 18, 2011. It was largely through Young’s resolute and indomitable efforts that she coordinated press coverage of the Parvaz campaign, which resulted in more than 1,200 print, radio, television and Web stories, while communicating with Congressional offices, giving televised interviews, producing and distributing press releases, writing delivered speeches, helping develop website and graphic art for posters, and bumper stickers. She also mounted successful Facebook and Twitter campaigns, while soliciting letters from a number of distinguished international institutions. “Running the Free Dorothy campaign'' Young said, “taught me the power of the network — friends and colleagues I loved for being themselves but who, on their own recognizance, sustained international, national and regional media coverage and viral social media events. Without loving the people and land around you, there’s no point to existence, as far as I can tell.’’
Having been so successful in transferring her reporting skills into other challenging areas since the demise of the Post-Intelligencer, what advice does Young have for those trying to reinvent themselves in their post-newsroom stage of their careers? “Hard work, frequent but sincere networking, late nights spent applying for random fellowships, grants, jobs and other opportunities, time spent in reflection, time spent on strategy, and chart all progress on your resume and online self-promotion, and avoid the hangdog look of "I got screwed out of my last job" — if you can. Stay positive, stay focused, make to do lists and check off each accomplishment, no matter how small.’’
Young graduated with a B.A. magna cum laude in History and Literature of Latin America from Harvard University; and is a 2012 graduate of the University of Washington’s Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing.
In 2007, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers presented her with the Best in Business, General Excellence award (medium circulation); and in 2006, the Society of Professional Journalists, Pacific Northwest Chapters awarded her first place for Best Government Reporting and Best Online Business Adaptation.
With hopes of encouraging other newspaper alums, Young shared with me a quote she came across in 2007, which she pinned to the bulletin board next to her computer at the Post-Intelligencer and took it with her when the paper folded. It’s a quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German artist, writer and politician. “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now.’’
-Bill Lucey
WPLucey@gmail.com
August 12, 2012
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