Chris Arnold

Steve Barrett

NPR correspondent Chris Arnold is based in Boston. His reports are heard regularly on NPR's award-winning newsmagazines Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition. He joined NPR in 1996, and was based in San Francisco before moving to Boston in 2001.

Arnold is currently covering the housing downturn and the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. He's reported on how a breakdown in lending standards has led to the highest foreclosure rate in the U.S. in more than 50 years. For his series on the sub-prime lender Ameriquest, he interviewed former employees from around the country who described widespread fraud at the company's offices. With more than a million people now facing foreclosure, Arnold continues to cover the ongoing crisis and the efforts to resolve it. For this work, Arnold was honored by the Scripps Howard Foundation as a finalist for their National Journalism Award.

Arnold has covered a range of other subjects and stories for NPR – from Katrina recovery in New Orleans and the gulf coast, to immigrant workers in the fishing industry, to a new kind of table saw that won't cut your fingers off. He traveled to Turin, Italy, for NPR's coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics. He has also followed the dramatic rise in the numbers of teenagers abusing the powerful and highly addictive painkiller Oxycontin – more than 1 out of 20 high school seniors report using the drug.

In the days and months following Sept. 11, Arnold reported from New York, and contributed to the NPR coverage that won the Overseas Press Club Award and the George Foster Peabody Award in 2001. He chronicled the recovery effort at Ground Zero, focusing on members of the Port Authority Police department, as they struggled with the deaths of 37 officers - the greatest loss of any police department in U.S. history. Arnold also followed the lives of those who lived and worked around ground zero - from bond-traders and Chinatown garment sewers to small business owners - as they sought to put their lives back together again.

Prior to his move to Boston, Arnold traveled the country for NPR doing feature stories on entrepreneurship. His pieces covered technologists, farmers, and family business owners. He also reported on efforts to kindle entrepreneurship in economically disadvantaged areas ranging from inner-city Los Angeles to the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota.

Arnold has worked in public radio since 1993. Before joining NPR, he was a freelance reporter working out of San Francisco's NPR Member station, KQED.