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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

  • caption: Asian Bike Club is now Ampersand Bikes Club

    A bike builds a bridge

    Anti-Asian hate crimes spiked during the Covid-19 pandemic. And then the Atlanta spa shooting scarred a community already suffering.

  • caption: Shawn Wong

    A book becomes a movement

    Shawn Wong discovered the first Japanese American novel, No-No Boy, at a used bookstore for 50 cents, after being told by his English professors that Asian American literature didn’t exist.

  • JizuBodhisattva.png

    A Jizo Bodhisattva cradles grief

    During the mizu kuyo ritual for pregnancy loss, a small Jizo Bodhisattva statue enshrines ceremonial remains of a lost child. Following Shin Yu’s miscarriage in 2012, she had a mizu kuyo ceremony to process her grief.

  • caption: Donna reads Ana's letter to the future.

    A time capsule returns

    On the eve of selling her family’s house, Donna Miscolta’s daughter had a special request: Go to the stairwell and pull back the loose board on the bottom step.

  • caption: Eason Yang

    A resume loses its shine

    Eason Yang was on an ambitious career trajectory, helping tech companies like Uber change the world. Until he got cancer.

  • caption: Ten Thousand Things: Artifacts of Asian American Life

    The Blue Suit is back... now as Ten Thousand Things

    In many Chinese sayings, “ten thousand” is used in a poetic sense to convey something infinite, vast, and unfathomable. For Shin Yu Pai – award-winning poet and museologist – the story of Asians in America is just that. Introducing Ten Thousand Things, a special podcast series about modern-day artifacts of Asian American life, created and hosted by Shin Yu Pai and produced by KUOW.