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Jim Gates

Senior Editor

About

As Senior Editor Jim heads up the development of podcasts for KUOW’s AudioShop and helps guide reporters and producers through their stories. He helped develop KUOW’s daily news podcast Seattle Now and currently oversees THE WILD with Chris Morgan. Other podcasts he oversaw and edited include Second Wave, Battle Tactics for Your Sexist Workplace and How to Be a Girl which was nominated for a Peabody Award. Jim developed KUOW’s popular community story telling project Local Wonder where listeners ask questions about their community and then vote on the stories that they want KUOW reporters to cover.

Jim helped to oversee and develop one of public radio’s first investigative reporting units at KUOW with the mission to provide in-depth coverage of issues that affect Washington and the Puget Sound Region. Jim was the fill-in news director and led the breaking news coverage on several major stories.

Prior to coming to KUOW, Jim worked as an editor on such national shows as NPR’s Day to Day and Marketplace. Jim helped develop and launch the weekly magazine show Weekend America where he directed the live broadcast and edited feature stories. He started his public radio career as a volunteer at NPR member station KPCC in Los Angeles. Jim kept showing up at the station and eventually they actually started paying him. Jim moved to national programming when he joined the staff of The Savvy Traveler in 2000 as producer of the interview and listener segments.

Jim’s career in story telling began when he was a television writer on several sitcoms (a skill that is oddly applicable to public radio). He was on the writing team of The Discovery Channel’s first fiction show Animal Rescue Kids which won two Genesis Awards from the Human Society of the United States.

Location: Seattle

Language: English

Pronouns: he/him/his

To see more of Jim's past KUOW work, visit our archive site.

Podcasts

Stories

  • Ghost Herd Logo FINAL
    Ghost Herd

    Part 6: The Reckonin'

    Native Americans once owned these lands, and they still treat the Columbia Basin as their sacred home. We’ve all benefited from that taken land, but now corporations are the West’s new settlers. Meanwhile, Cody faces a federal judge and his tight-knit rural community. His sons start taking over what remains of the family’s vast operation and beat-up reputation.

  • Ghost Herd Logo FINAL
    Ghost Herd

    Part 5: The Bidding War

    The Easterday empire is being broken apart. Some of the most valuable farmland in America is up for sale, and the billionaires are coming to town. The bidding war over water-rich lands shows the shift in how America farms.

  • Ghost Herd Logo FINAL
    Ghost Herd

    Part 4: The Crash

    Cody's swindle comes crashing down, and it’s all thanks to Covid. When a giant meat operation discovers the truth about his ghost herd, they take aim at Cody.

  • Ghost Herd Logo FINAL
    Ghost Herd

    Part 3: The Gamble

    Why would someone create a ghost herd? Behind Cody Easterday’s swindle was an even-bigger gambling habit on the futures market. That vice may have changed the price of American beef slapping down on your kitchen table. We also look at how all farmin’ is a gamble.

  • Ghost Herd Logo FINAL
    Ghost Herd

    Part 2: The Swindle

    Cowboy Cody Easterday lies big, creating a “ghost herd” of 265,000 cattle that only exist on paper and bringing in hundreds of millions of investment dollars from companies including a meat-packing giant. It’s fraud on a massive scale. We examine how he carried it out.

  • Ghost Herd Logo FINAL
    Ghost Herd

    Part 1: The Empire Builders

    Meet the Easterdays – ranching royalty rooted in the Columbia Basin in southeast Washington state. But behind the well-known family name hides a dark secret, concealed in spreadsheets and bum invoices, that’s eating away at their vast empire.

  • caption: Paul Kikuchi next to the Califone in the Panama Hotel Tea Room
    The Blue Suit

    A record player is a time machine

    The vintage Califone record player allows sound artist Paul Kikuchi to access and share songs that he inherited from his great-grandfather and other 78rpm records that were left behind by Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.