Owen Racer

Before joining Cascadia Daily News, Racer reported on intergenerational farming in Ecuador and El Salvador for The Guardian, documenting how consumerism, climate change and emigration collide on farms that future generations decide to inherit or leave. In Washington, D.C., he covered the IRS and Congress for Bloomberg. In New York City, he reported on maternal health disparities, riding the city’s subways with mobile mental illness teams to explain how the increasingly popular model of mental health care impacts the workforce. From producing audio stories on mental health for NPR stations WHYY and WVXU in Cincinnati, Ohio, his hometown, to photographing youth impacted by gun violence in New Orleans, his reporting crosses topics and mediums. During the 2024 presidential election, he was the lone U.S. correspondent for The Kyiv Independent, Ukraine’s English-language media outlet, covering campaigns, foreign policy and Congress. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism in New York City.

Cascadia Daily News

Cascadia Daily News, a three-year-old news startup, is a hyperlocal, fiercely independent digital/print publication covering Northwest Washington state from a newsroom in Bellingham, WA. CDN's 14 staffers lead the region between Seattle and Vancouver, B.C. in breaking news, enterprise and accountability journalism in a vibrant university city on the Salish Sea. Our collaborative team of seasoned and young journalists is consumer-focused and committed to mixing old traditions with new strategies to push local news forward.