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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Small-town hospitals were already closing at an alarming rate before COVID-19, but now the trend appears to be accelerating just as the disease arrives in rural America. -
There's still a serious shortage of testing for COVID-19 across the country. Many people who are sick and showing likely symptoms say they still can't get tested. -
Some states in the rural West are still reporting very low numbers of COVID-19 cases. But there are pockets with high infection rates: wealthy resort towns with a lot of visitor traffic. -
Small-town hospitals are under-equipped to deal with the coronavirus, and administrators warn it's a misperception that people in isolated rural areas are safer from exposure.
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America's worsening homelessness crisis can feel like an intractable problem. But Spokane, Wash., may be having some early success trying some new tactics to help its most vulnerable. -
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management's acting chief says the decision to relocate the agency's headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Grand Junction, Colo., means "locals can come and see us." -
With Pacific Northwest salmon and steelhead on the brink of extinction, there are new efforts being brokered to save the famed fish. -
The Trump administration has extended the appointment for the controversial acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, which is in charge of roughly 10% of all the land in the U.S.
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The denial upholds a lower court ruling that put severe limits on cities' ability to enforce anti-camping ordinances on streets and in public rights of way. Advocates for the homeless lauded the move. -
Cities in the West that are dealing with an explosion of homelessness are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a lower court ruling that limits bans on camping in public parks and rights of way.
