Meet John
I’m an award-winning journalist who has traveled the world as both a newspaperman and magazine writer. After spending 26 years at the Los Angeles Times, a career that included stints as a foreign and national correspondent, I am now a human-interest blogger and literary nonfiction writer looking for new foreign and domestic adventures.
My work has been included in such national anthologies as “Best American Sports Writing” and “Best Los Angeles Times Foreign Reporting.”
Over the years, I have optioned the film rights to numerous stories and wrote a screenplay for Jon Peters based on my Los Angeles Times story that delved into the subculture of drag queens in Los Angeles. I currently have two film projects in the works: one on the sad and sweet life of a Jewish baker who cooked for the Nazis during World War Two and another on tent boxing in the Australian Outback.
As a Seoul-based LA Times foreign correspondent from 2008 through 2012, my beat covered one-quarter of the world’s water mass: South Korea, North Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the Pacific Islands.
Whew.
I chronicled an often-raucous South Korea, and pulled stories out of North Korea, one of the most opaque places on earth. I also reported widely on Japan, including the deadly 2011 tsunami, Fukushima nuclear power plant meltdown and its aftermath.
As the Times Las Vegas bureau chief, I covered a large swath of the American West, writing about everything from people to politics. I’ve also written extensively about California and have co-taught a journalism course at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I left The Times in 2015.
I am currently a freelance writer, dividing my time between Las Vegas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. My work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Outside, California Sunday Magazine, Las Vegas Review Journal, Desert Companion magazine, Phoenix New Times and other publications.