Whitney Henry-Lester
Podcast Producer
About
Whitney is a podcast producer at KUOW. She helped develop some of KUOW's first podcasts, including How's Your Day? and Second Wave.
Whitney has a degree in film, but she has spent most of her career producing and editing audio stories. She has also worked with StoryCorps, The Third Coast International Audio Festival, 99% Invisible, and Transom.org.
She once ran an audio artists residency from her apartment in Lima, Peru.
Location: Tacoma
Languages: English, Spanish
Pronouns: she/they
Stories
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A blue suit becomes history
The story behind the viral and historic blue suit that inspired this podcast.
-
Califone
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.
-
Chinese-English Dictionary
After his father's death, Byron Au Yong turned to paper folding.
-
A childhood stuffie goes missing
The Blue Suit's host, Shin Yu Pai, revisits an object from her own life.
-
Vitrified Glass
In a small clear box, Etsuko Ichikawa keeps a small piece of vitrified glass that was given to her on a tour of the Hanford nuclear site.
-
Miso
Tomo Nakayama usually puts his creative energy into his harmonious music. But when the pandemic hit, he found a new outlet: cooking.
-
Night-Blooming Cereus
Jessica Rubenacker collects plants. Lots of plants.