Radio news director followed story to Louisiana

Amy Jeffries, who became WRKF's first news director last month, came to Baton Rouge in September 2005, three weeks after Hurricane Katrina and just in time for Hurricane Rita.

Jeffries was on a temporary assignment with National Public Radio to help with coverage of the aftermath of Katrina.

Baton Rouge's heat and humidity in what was supposed to be fall kept fogging the lens of Jeffries' camera.

"I loved it," Jeffries said. "I hate the cold."

The 32-year-old Jeffries grew up in Connecticut. She learned radio first as a freshman volunteer at Trinity College's station in Hartford and, then, at Wesleyan University 30 minutes from Trinity.

Jeffries had been the only student to show up for the "radio meeting" at Trinity.

"The students at Trinity were disengaged," she said. "The professors were awesome. The students were looking toward careers in finance, not the arts."

Jeffries transferred to Wesleyan, where it turned out she and 250 other students wanted to work on the university's radio station.

Trinity may have been disengaged, but it gave Jeffries her start in radio in 1997.

"They threw me on the air with no training," she said. "I had no idea what I was doing, but I started doing it."

Jeffries, who played the flute in high school, found she liked interviewing singer / songwriters. Unpaid, Jeffries drove a red Dodge Shadow her parents bought from a neighbor to interviews in Boston and New York.

"It was a 1990-something," she said. "I don't think it had power anything. It had a radio because I put one in."

Jeffries was a philosophy major at Wesleyan.

"Radio brought a lot of things together for me," she said. "I had a sonic orientation, and there was this outlet for creative writing and synthesizing complex information."

By 2001, Jeffries was "doing news, rewriting Associated Press copy and going out on non-critical press conferences."

In 2002, she was doing an arts and culture news show at WNPR in Hartford.

She got a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2008 was writing and editing stories for online news services.

While at Berkeley, Jeffries got graduate student reporting experience in South Africa, Zimbabwe and China, from a week in China to 2 1/2 months in South Africa.

In 2005, Jeffries had answered a call from National Public Radio to all available reporters to help cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

"NPR had never done that and hasn't done it since," Jeffries said. "Luck of the draw, I was paired with WRKF."

For six weeks, Jeffries lived in a WRKF staffer's apartment while covering installation of the FEMA trailer park in Baker, the overnight traffic snarls in Baton Rouge, Homeland Security, Red Cross shelters and, then, Hurricane Rita, which landed Sept. 23 between Sabine Pass and Johnson Bayou on the Louisiana coast near the Texas border.

At WRKF, Jeffries wants to do detailed stories in 4- to 8-minute cutaways during "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered."

She wants to take a fresh look at stories other media outlets are covering.

"Black people here are being murdered," Jeffries said. "That's not unique to Baton Rouge, but why can't Baton Rouge bring down the murder rate? Los Angeles did. New York City did."