Jake Harper

About

I fell in love with making audio stories at WORT in Madison, WI, where I volunteered on the afternoon news show. In 2015, I got a job covering health at the NPR affiliate in Indianapolis just weeks before the state announced an HIV outbreak in Austin, Ind. — an international news event that pulled me into years of daily stories, features and investigations on addiction, Medicaid and other public health issues. Later, I got the chance to start a podcast, Sick, about what goes wrong in places meant to keep us healthy. The show was named one of the best podcasts of the year by The Atlantic and has been downloaded millions of times. In 2018, my station loaned me to NPR’s Science desk where I helped cover the aftermath of Hurricane Michael. During the pandemic, I brushed up on some latent coding skills to dig into state prisons, scraping state data to find potential sources to tell me what was happening inside. My prison reporting led to a wage increase for correctional staff, a departmental investigation into the Indiana Women’s Prison, the end of a harsh lockdown at IWP and the forced retirement of a warden. SKILLS Spanish Project Management Podcast Development Story Editing Narrative Storytelling Audio Production Investigative Reporting Creative Interviewing Storyboarding Data Analysis Podcast Marketing Breaking News Coverage