John McChesney, NPR Biography
Senior Correspondent, San Francisco
Since 1979 senior correspondent John McChesney has been with NPR, where he has served as national editor (responsible for domestic news) and senior foreign editor. Over the course of his career with NPR, McChesney covered a variety of beats and traveled extensively throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. His reports can be heard on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and newscasts.
During the PC revolution and rise of the Internet in the 1990s, McChesney was NPR's primary technology reporter in Silicon Valley, a beat that built naturally on his experience covering Japan and growing challenge to the American computer chip industry. Following the dot com bust, he shifted his focus to other kinds of coverage, including investigations into food safety, mostly about ecoli outbreaks, the rapid growth of the organic food industry, and the use of new technologies in agriculture. He produced a major series on agriculture in California's Central Valley, the most productive farming region in the world.
In 2007, McChesney has been reporting on the war in Iraq, with reports from the home front as well as Iraq, where he embedded with four National Guard units. In 2005 he produced a major investigative piece on the only death to occur in the Abu Ghraib scandal; and in 2006, along with host Jacki Lyden, he produced a major NPR documentary on the story of an American sniper who killed an Iraqi journalist. He has reported on National Guard training, equipment shortages, extended deployments, and the burden placed on families by long deployments. He has also reported on several major military trials of Navy Seals, Abu Ghraib Military Police, and U.S. Marines.
McChesney has won numerous awards for his work, including a Silver Gavel from the American Bar Association, Dartmouth's Champion Award for business and economic reporting, and the Sidney Hilman Award for his series on manufacturing technology.
Reared in Maine and Missouri, McChesney spent four years in the Air Force and then attended Southern Methodist University, where he graduated with high honors. He spent four years of post-graduate study in American Literature at Stanford University, and he taught for six years at Antioch College in Ohio. He is based in San Francisco, California.
