Anna Scott is a full-time radio reporter for the Santa Monica-based NPR station KCRW, where she reports on housing issues in Los Angeles. She talks about her job, which involves talking to many people who are homeless or near homeless, and how she herself gets by, along with her husband and 15-month-old son.
We talk about the finer points of covering Los Angeles’ complex housing market, from giga-mansions on one end to vast homelessness on the other; how the psychology of talking with those struggling with homelessness effects her emotionally, how a history of alcoholism in her family informs her work and personal lives (including the occasional catastrophic thinking); how much she earns as a full-time reporter, and how she’s able to re-package her local stories for the NPR national market and get paid additionally for those stories; and how, despite the difficult realities she covers through the course of her conversations, she still loves L.A. for its richness, its stories, and even its history.
Season 2- housing. Episode 31: NPR reporter Anna Scott, on how she (and everyone else) gets by in Los Angeles
