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Reporting from the St. George area focused on local government, public lands and the environment, indigenous issues and faith and spirituality.

KUER Opens Bureaus, Adds Reporters In Southern Utah

Report For America photo.
Report For America

KUER announced Thursday the station will establish its first regional bureaus — and add two reporters to its ranks — in partnership with the national service program Report For America. Set to open in June, the bureaus will serve audiences in under-covered areas in southwestern and southeastern Utah.

 

Reporters Kate Groetzinger and David Fuchs were selected by RFA and KUER to serve as participants, or “corps members,” in the service program now entering its second year. Though KUER is based in Salt Lake City, both reporters will live in the southern Utah communities served by their bureaus and by KUER’s statewide broadcast signal.

Groetzinger and Fuchs will also lead community engagement projects as part of their service requirement as corps members.

 

KUER’s Southeast Utah Bureau, as it will be known, will be based in San Juan County. The Southwest Utah Bureau will be be based in the St. George area. Both initiatives will focus on local government, public lands and the environment, indigenous issues, faith and spirituality and other topics of relevance to Utahns.

Groetzinger and Fuchs are among 61 reporters placed by RFA in 50 news organizations across 28 states and Puerto Rico. The newly minted corps members were chosen from a highly competitive pool of nearly 1,000 applicants. In keeping with the goals of RFA, an initiative of The GroundTruth Project, corps members report on under-covered issues and communities, with the goal of addressing “an urgent need in American journalism at a time when local news deserts threaten our democracy like never before.”

The bureau reporters’ work will be supported by funding from RFA and KUER. In addition, several local partner organizations will offer key resources to support the bureaus, including Radio Dixie at Dixie State University, Utah State University-Blanding and DesignBuildBLUFF, a non-profit working in local housing and education in responsive design and construction.

 
 

About the reporters:

Photo of Kate Groetzinger.
Credit Courtesy of Kate Groetzinger

Kate Groetzinger (Southeast Utah Bureau) joins us from Austin, Texas, where she is completing a master's degree in journalism at the University of Texas at Austin's Moody School of Journalism. She has worked for Austin’s NPR station, KUT, and her work has been published in the Texas Observer, The Austin Chronicle, Quartz, Rhode Island Magazine and Artsy. She has also worked for the Voces Oral History Archive at the University of Texas, collecting and preserving the stories of Latino/a civil rights leaders in Texas. She holds a degree in English from Brown University.

Photo of David Fuchs.
Credit Courtesy of David Fuchs

David Fuchs (Southwest Utah Bureau) is a northern California native currently based in New York, where he moved in 2017 to intern with the acclaimed public radio program Radiolab and produce podcasts for Crooked Media and CBS News. His journalism career began at local newspapers and radio stations in Vermont and California. Later, he honed his audio production skills with the public radio teams at The Kitchen Sisters and NPR West. His work has been featured on Morning Edition, All Things Considered, PRI’s The World, Outside and elsewhere. He also holds a degree in geography from Middlebury College in Vermont.

Listeners can expect to hear Kate Groetzinger and David Fuchs on air starting in late June.

 
A charter member of NPR, KUER 90.1 broadcasts from the Eccles Broadcast Center at the University of Utah. KUER provides a commercial-free mix of local and national news and storytelling to more than 175,000 weekly listeners across 80 percent of the state. KUER and its HD channels can be streamed online at kuer.org and with KUER's mobile app. For media-related inquiries, please contact Renee Bright, KUER’s Marketing and Design Manager, at (801) 581-4057 or rbright@kuer.org.

KUER is listener-supported public radio. Support this work by making a donation today.