Corey Flintoff, NPR Biography
Correspondent, Foreign Desk
After 17 years as the afternoon voice of NPR's newscasts, Corey Flintoff is stepping out from the newscaster's booth to be a correspondent with the NPR Foreign Desk. Flintoff began a temporary stint on the Foreign Desk in the summer of 2005, reporting from Iraq, Jerusalem and Haiti. As correspondent, Flintoff reports for NPR's newsmagazines and the world news section of NPR.org.
Flintoff joined NPR as a newscaster in 1990. For years, he was a part of NPR listeners' homeward commutes, reporting the latest news at the start of each hour of All Things Considered. He referred to newscasting as "news haiku" — distilling the day's complex events into short, straightforward stories that give listeners a fair grasp of what's going on in the world at any given time. Flintoff has also been heard as a reporter for NPR's newsmagazines, as a fill-in host, and as Carl Kasell's understudy on Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. He performs in radio dramas and travels frequently to speak on behalf of NPR member stations.
Flintoff is part of NPR's "Alaska Mafia," which includes Peter Kenyon, Elizabeth Arnold, and other top reporters who got their start with the Alaska Public Radio Network. He was APRN's executive producer for seven years, hosting the evening newsmagazine Alaska News Nightly. He also freelanced for NPR, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Monitor Radio and the Associated Press. Flintoff won a 1989 Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award for his coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
Prior to APRN, Flintoff worked as a reporter and news director for KYUK-AM/TV in Bethel, Alaska, and KSKA-FM in Anchorage. He wrote and produced a number of television documentaries about Alaskan life, including "They Never Asked Our Fathers" and "Eyes of the Spirit," which have aired on PBS and are now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
Flintoff's first radio experience was at a bilingual English-Yup'ik Eskimo station in Bethel, Alaska, where he learned enough Yup'ik to announce the station identification. He tried commercial herring fishing, dog-mushing, fiction writing, and other pursuits, but failed to break out of the radio business.
Flintoff has a bachelor's degree from University of California at Berkeley and a master's from the University of Chicago, both in English Literature. Born in Fairbanks, Alaska, he now lives in the Washington, D.C., area with his wife, Diana Derby, and their daughter, Claire.
