Kirk Siegler
As a correspondent on NPR's national desk, Kirk Siegler covers rural life, culture and politics from his base in Boise, Idaho.
His beat explores the intersection and divisions between rural and urban America, including longer term reporting assignments that have taken him frequently to a struggling timber town in Idaho that lost two sawmills right before the election of President Trump. In 2018, after the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, Siegler spent months chronicling the diaspora of residents from Paradise, exploring the continuing questions over how – or whether – the town should rebuild in an era of worsening climate-driven wildfires.
Siegler's award winning reporting on the West's bitter land use controversies has taken listeners to the heart of anti-government standoffs in Oregon and Nevada, including a rare interview with recalcitrant rancher Cliven Bundy. He's also profiled numerous ranching and mining communities from Nebraska to New Mexico that have worked to reinvent themselves in a fast-changing global economy.
Siegler also contributes extensively to the network's breaking news coverage, from floods and hurricanes in Louisiana to deadly school shootings in Connecticut. In 2015, he was awarded an international reporting fellowship from Johns Hopkins University to report on health and development in Nepal. While en route to the country, the worst magnitude earthquake to hit the region in more than 80 years struck. The fellowship was cancelled, but Siegler was one of the first foreign journalists to arrive in Kathmandu and helped lead NPR's coverage of the immediate aftermath of the deadly quake. He also filed in-depth reports focusing on the humanitarian disaster and challenges of bringing relief to some of the Nepal's far-flung rural villages.
Before helping open the network's first ever bureau in Idaho at the studios of Boise State Public Radio in 2019, Siegler was based at the NPR West studios in Culver City, California. Prior to joining NPR in 2012, Siegler spent seven years reporting from Colorado, where he became a familiar voice to NPR listeners reporting on politics, water and the state's ski industry from Denver for NPR Member station KUNC. He got his start in political reporting covering the Montana Legislature for Montana Public Radio.
Apart from a brief stint working as a waiter in Sydney, Australia, Siegler has spent most of his adult life living in the West. He grew up in Missoula, Montana, and received a journalism degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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More than two months after the Camp Fire, the small city of Chico, Calif., is struggling to handle an influx of an estimated 20,000 new people from neighboring Paradise.
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The partial federal government shutdown has furloughed thousands of people who work on millions of acres of public land across the country. That means work on critical projects has mostly stopped.
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The current version of the Farm Bill includes House-backed provisions that would streamline logging projects on federal land. The administration argues logging could mitigate wildfire risk.
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Wildfires are burning more intensely than ever in California and that's prompting state and local officials to rethink strategies to mitigate the scale of future destruction.
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A mass shooting at a club in Thousand Oaks, California, last night has left the community reeling.
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A shooter killed 12 people and injured several more at a country music bar in Ventura County, Calif., late Wednesday. Among the dead was Sgt. Ron Helus, a 29-year veteran of law enforcement.
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A shooter killed 12 people and injured several more at a country music bar in Ventura County, Calif., late Wednesday.
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For the first time in years, Delta County in western Colorado is experiencing population growth, one indicator that rural Americans are increasingly feeling optimistic about their economic future.
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The Department of the Interior has chosen a prominent property rights attorney in Wyoming as their new deputy solicitor. Its a controversial appointment for environmental groups.
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The state has the highest poverty rate in the nation, largely because of a lack of affordable housing. In November, voters will decide whether or not rent controls will help solve the problem.