About | Cast & Crew
Sam Eaton
Senior Reporter, Sustainability Desk, Los Angeles
Sam Eaton first got his hands on a tape recorder in the second grade, and has been amazed by the things people say when you hold a microphone to their mouths ever since. But the radio career would have to wait. Sam studied English literature and fiction writing at Northwestern University. After graduating, he worked on research boats in Puget Sound and Alaska, attempting to piece together a Jack London-inspired literary career in his downtime. It was the stories and people Sam encountered along the way that moved him to once again pick up a tape recorder.
Soon he was shadowing Big Foot trackers in old growth forests and ducking tear gas canisters at the 1999 WTO riots as a reporter for the Seattle NPR station, KUOW. That led to Sam's first tour of duty with Marketplace in a jittery, post-9/11 New York. Eventually the travel bug got the best of him. Sam packed his bags and headed to El Salvador. There he continued to file stories for Marketplace and worked on an extensive radio documentary project for NPR's Latino USA called "Despues de las Guerras: Central America after the Wars."
Before joining Marketplace again as a Sustainability Reporter in Los Angeles, Sam moved to Boulder, Colorado where he spent a year studying environmental science, law, and policy as a Ted Scripps Fellow in Environmental Journalism at CU Boulder.
Sam's reporting has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Public Radio News Directors Inc., and the Associated Press.
