Alec Cowan
Senior Podcast Producer
About
Alec Cowan is a senior podcast producer at KUOW, where he works on Booming and other podcast projects.
Alec has worn many hats at KUOW. He helped launch Soundside and brought many eclectic stories to the program, from a late-night patrol with real life superheroes to the sewing machine sounds of an artisanal sail loft. Additionally, he was previously a producer for The Record with Bill Radke and the Primed podcast.
Before joining KUOW, Alec worked in NPR's Story Lab, where he helped pilot the Louder Than a Riot podcast and assisted in producing a story on volunteerism in Iraq for Rough Translation. Originally from Grand Junction, Colorado, his roots in the Northwest begin in Eugene, where he studied English and philosophy at the University of Oregon and worked as a news reporter for NPR member station KLCC. He is likely neglecting his saxophone, growing book collection, and expanding personal project list in favor of boosting his online Xbox ranking.
He's proud to be KUOW's unofficial "boat guy."
Location: Seattle
Languages Spoken: English
Pronouns: he/him/his
Podcasts
Stories
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Algorithms constantly make hard decisions online. Can they ever be truly ethical?
What happens when a search engine runs into a question? Say, is it rude to accept a phone call in a meeting? Is 10% a bad tip? Or is climate change real? Using a lot of computing power, websites like Google give us answers to any question we ask within seconds. But how does an algorithm know where to direct us, especially for our thorniest of questions?
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Wahkiakum School District sues WA over its education funding model
Wahkiakum County sits just north of the Columbia River on the Oregon border. It’s Washington’s smallest county, where the medium income sits just around $36,000 a year. If you go to school there, you’re learning in old buildings, oftentimes operating thanks to duct tape and chicken wire solutions.
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There's a seed shortage in WA. What does that mean for our beloved forests?
Nearly half of Washington state is forested. That's 22 million acres of douglas firs, red alders, western hemlock, and ponderosa pine, to name a few. But as wildfires grow in both size and regularity, do we have enough seeds for our forests to recover?
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Tourism is booming in our small towns. But can locals afford to enjoy it?
This month we visited a few of our popular Washington tourist destinations. We wanted to know: how has the pandemic reshaped tourism? What changes has the pandemic, and tourism broadly, brought to some of our most beautiful places? Today, we break down what we learned and dive into one of the biggest themes we heard about: how booming tourism has made living in our small towns untenable.
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Could psychedelic mushrooms be used to treat depression in Washington?
Psilocybin, the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” shows promise for treating depression and PTSD. A new bill in Olympia, if passed, would make this treatment available to Washingtonians under very specific circumstances.
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Washington loves its public lands — perhaps a little too much
There are 19.8 million acres of public land here in Washington. That's larger than nearly 10 U.S. states. How did we end up with so much public land?
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Why Microsoft is diving into the metaverse... And what the metaverse even is
Microsoft's acquisition of videogame publisher Activision Blizzard is not quite a done deal, but we've got lots of questions about what this massive purchase could mean for one of our region's largest employers -- and our favorite games.
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Unlocking the secrets of Puget Sound sea slugs
Without a boat or special gear, a lot of our favorite sea creatures remain out of our everyday reach. But there is a little guy you can find most any day on your neighborhood dock: sea slugs, also known by their scientific name, nudibranchs.
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Our neighbors Sound-under
Soundside takes a deep dive into the waters around Washington to learn about some of our less appreciated neighbors. Because while they may be lesser-known, they have a lot to tell us about our ecosystems, and might even offer some innovative solutions to everyday problems.
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Decades later, a collection of photographs is filling in the corners of Washington's Latino history
Irwin Nash photographed the living and working conditions of workers in the Yakima Valley during the height of the United Farm Workers' Movement. Thanks to technology, his photos are bringing that story to the forefront today.