Katie Jane Fernelius
Katie Jane is available for
I am looking for opportunities to work in collaboration on reported podcast series. I also want to build radio community through public storytelling initiatives, local workshops, and other outreach opportunities! As always, I am available for tape syncs.- Editing
- Producing
- Recording
- Reporting
- Scripting
- Writing
About Katie Jane
I am a journalist and radio producer based in New Orleans.
Recent projects include:
- Story-editing the 8-episode miniseries, Summer of ’85, for Audible Originals about the intertwined stories of the 1985 bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia and the first LiveAID concert hosted that same summer.
- Providing development production for a 4-episode series for The Guardian’s “Today in Focus” podcast about the District Attorney’s office in New Orleans: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.
I produced the first three seasons (26 episodes) of the Quartz Obsession podcast. Each episode focuses on one particular phenomenon––like paper cash, egg freezing, or Google Docs––and what it can tell us about the global economy. My responsibilities include interview prep, script feedback, producing the interviews, trouble-shooting, and editing each interview into a deliverable episode.
I produced a 5-episode season for the podcast Gravy themed around “Marketing the South.” Each episode delves into the wiles of specific marketing campaigns—and the communities who ridiculed, challenged, or fashioned new values through them. This season, I was responsible for all aspects of production from pre- to post-production.
I have worked as an independent journalist for over 5 years. I’ve reported for The Appeal, The Nation, Popula, Current Affairs, The Assembly, In These Times, Scalawag, Africa Is a Country, The New Republic, Atlas Obscura, INDY Week, and elsewhere. In my reporting, I’ve covered the criminal legal beat, investigated sheriff’s offices and megachurches alike, and written multiple magazine-length features. My favorite story I’ve worked on is one that I wrote about a billionaire-funded private city in Lagos, Nigeria—and its connection to British colonialism, oil-driven dictatorships, and a history of state-funded executions.
In the past, I’ve reported, produced, and hosted a radio documentary and short video for the BBC World Service and Sundance Institute about a private city in Lagos, Nigeria. I also produced Commonplace, the Knight Foundation’s On View, and the New School’s New Histories. I’ve done audio engineering and tape syncs for multiple programs.
I co-curated the 2018 and 2019 seasons of Audio Under the Stars, a summer-long audio festival in Durham, North Carolina.
Ask me about my time in Lagos, Nigeria on a Fulbright research fellowship, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, or my experiences as a writing coach at my local community college.
Katie Jane's Portfolio
On View
On View is a series that explores how museums are evolving to keep pace with society, how they can become welcoming to a wider public, and how technology offers new opportunities to reach audiences. Hosted by Chris Barr, Knight Foundation's Director of Arts + Technology Innovation.
New Histories
New Histories is a three-part podcast series. Hosted by Public Seminar senior editors Julia Foulkes and Mark Larrimore, New Histories explores The New School’s past on the occasion of its centenary. The New School has been a place of visionary innovation in education, but also one of endless starts and stops, failed initiatives, and abbreviated success. The centenary of The New School offers a chance to look at a university that began as an educational experiment and critique of higher education and how it has evolved into the behemoth it is today.
Commonplace: Conversations with Poets (and Other People)
A series of intimate and captivating interviews by Rachel Zucker with poets and artists about quotidian objects, experiences or obsessions, Commonplace conversations explore the recipes, advice, lists, anecdotes, quotes, politics, phobias, spiritual practices, and other non-Literary forms of knowledge that are vital to an artist’s life and work. One feels, when listening to Commonplace, the pleasure of eavesdropping on the kind of unexpected, intriguing connections that only happen when interesting people sit together in a small room and talk about their real concerns and ordinary lives.
The Battle for the Future of Lagos
The story of one of the most ambitious, privatised cities in West Africa, which involves dredging up millions of tons of sand to build 10 square kilometres of land off the coast of Lagos. Reporters Katie Jane Fernelius and Ishan Thakore look at Eko Atlantic City, a city with its own private electricity, water supply and sewage system that works to make Lagos the Dubai of Africa, and fight coastal erosion. But the construction of the city displaced the residents and patrons of what remained of Bar Beach, a neighbourhood that is tangled up in the history of Lagos.
The Quartz Obsession podcast
Reporters from Quartz's global newsroom dig into the most fascinating facets of an idea: where it came from, how it got to us, and what it can tell us about the forces that are changing the way we live and work.
Gravy
Marketing the South: Each episode delves into the wiles of specific marketing campaigns—and the communities who ridiculed, challenged, or fashioned new values through them. For this season, I was responsible for all aspects of production from pre- to post-production. Linked below is the last episode about balikbayan boxes in the Filipino community.
Summer of '85
Welcome to the summer of 1985 in Philadelphia, when the city was rocked—in almost every sense of the word—by two unprecedented events: Mayor W. Wilson Goode’s May 13 decision to bomb the headquarters of MOVE, a controversial Philadelphia-based radical communal organization, and the July 13 Live Aid concert, where international rock royalty convened in Philly to raise money for victims of the Ethiopian famine.
Experience
Skills
- Tape Syncs
- Story Editing
- Show Development
- Research
- Reporting
- Producing
- Interviewing
- Field Recording
- Field Producing
Equipment
- Pro Tools
- Hindenburg Journalist Pro
- Zoom H6
- Rode shotgun mic
- Rode condenser mic
- Descript