Howard Berkes Bio, Age, Wife, NPR, Net worth, Salary, Twitter

Howard Berkes Biography

Howard Berkes is an American award-winning journalist who serves as a correspondent for the NPR Investigations Unit. He has trained news reporters in workshops across the country and served as a guest faculty member at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. He joined NPR in 1981.

Howard Berkes Age

Berkes likes to keep his personal life private hence he has not yet disclosed the date, month, or year he was born. However, he might be in his 60’s.

Howard Berkes Height

Berkes stands at a height of 5 ft 8 in. (1.78 m)

Howard Berkes Family

Berkes was born and raised in Pennsylvania then later moved to Oregon. However, he has not disclosed any information about his parents to the public yet. It is also not known if Berkes has any siblings.

Howard Berkes Wife

Berkes is very private about his personal life therefore it is not known if he is in any relationship. There are also no rumors of him being in any past relationship with anyone.

Howard Berkes Net Worth

Berkes has an estimated net worth of between $1 Million – $5 Million which he has earned through his successful career as a journalist.

Howard Berkes Photo
Howard Berkes Photo

Howard Berkes Salary

Berkes earns an annual salary ranging between $ 45,000 – $ 110,500.

Howard Berkes Education

Berkes educational background has not been disclosed to the public yet. However, in 1997, he was awarded a Nieman Foundation Journalism Fellowship at Harvard University.

Howard Berkes Career

Berkes serves as a correspondent for the NPR Investigations Unit. He has mostly concentrated on investigative projects since 2010, beginning with the Upper Big Branch coal mine catastrophe in West Virginia, which claimed the lives of 29 miners.

Berkes has reported on coal mine and workplace safety issues since then, including the Upper Big Branch mine’s safety lapses, other mine safety regulatory failures, the resurgence of the deadly coal miners’ disease black lung, and lax enforcement of grain bin safety as worker deaths reached record highs. Berkes was part of the team that teamed with the Center for Public Integrity in 2011 to produce Poisoned Places, a series that examined flaws in state and federal air pollution control.

Berkes teamed with ProPublica on Insult to Injury, a series of stories about a “race to the bottom” in workers’ compensation payouts across the country, which won the IRE Medal from Investigative Reporters & Editors, as well as other major journalism accolades, in 2015 and 2016. Since 2014, Berkes has won four IRE awards for investigative reporting.

Berkes spent a decade as NPR’s first rural affairs correspondent before joining the Investigations Unit.
His reportage centered on rural America’s politics, economics, and culture. Berkes, who was based in Salt Lake City, covered stories that were often unique to rural towns or offered a rural viewpoint on significant topics and events. He was a member of the NPR reporting team that covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and 2006, focusing on the effects in rural regions.

His rural reporting includes the effects of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq on military families and service members from rural America, as well as a disproportionate death rate among troops from rural regions. Berkes has written about rural voters’ influence on presidential and congressional elections.

Beginning with the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, he has covered eight summers and winter Olympic games. In 1998, his reporting on Salt Lake City’s Olympic bid helped turn a mostly local story concerning dubious payments to the relatives of IOC members into an international ethics crisis that culminated in Federal and Congressional probes.

Berkes’ Olympic and investigative reporting has made him a valuable resource for other news organizations, including The PBS Newshour, CNN, MSNBC, A&E’s Investigative Reports, the British Broadcasting Corporation, L’Express, Al Jazeera America, and others.

Berkes joined NPR in 1981 as one of the station’s first national reporters, stationed in Salt Lake City, where he pioneered coverage of the American West’s interior and public lands concerns. He drove thousands of miles to every corner of the region, stopping along ranch roads, city streets, desert washes, and mountain switchbacks to record the voices and noises that define the region.

Berkes is well known for providing the first thorough description of Morton Thiokol engineers’ failed attempt to abort the deadly 1986 launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. The report, which won a number of major national journalistic honors, was co-authored by Berkes and NPR’s Daniel Zwerdling. Berkes followed up with a second award-winning study in 1989, this time looking at the work to modify the Space Shuttle’s rocket boosters.

Berkes updated one of the booster rocket engineers that sought to stop the Challenger launch and was an anonymous source in the Berkes-Zwerdling investigation in 2016. When 89-year-old Bob Ebeling told Berkes that he still felt responsible for the Challenger astronauts’ deaths, he was ailing and in hospice care. Hundreds of NPR listeners and readers responded with sympathetic notes, which helped Ebeling cope with his guilt. He died a few weeks later, at peace, according to his relatives.

Howard Berkes Awards

Berkes work has been honored with more than 40 major journalism awards, including those given by the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University, the Online News Association, the National Press Club, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, the UCLA Anderson Loeb Awards, and the National Association of Science Writers. He also won five Edward R. Murrow Awards for investigative, sports, feature, and online audio reporting.

Howard Berkes NPR

Berkes is currently working at NPR where he works alongside other famous NPR anchors and reporters including;

  1. Richard Gonzales
  2. Erika Beras
  3. Ramtin Arablouei
  4. Amanda Aronczyk
  5. Deborah Amos
  6. Daniel Alarcon
  7. Bobby Allyn
  8. Greg Allen
  9. Rund Abdelfatah

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