kate (k.e.) harloe is an award-winning independent journalist. Her work has appeared in a wide range of local and national publications, including Mother Jones magazine, New York Focus, The Drift, Nieman Lab, San Francisco Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, North Country Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is a founding member of Flaming Hydra, a cooperative publication of 60 celebrated writers, where she writes a regular column. She has over a decade of experience in journalism and has been widely recognized for her writing on media and politics, as well as for her expertise in media policy, grassroots organizing, and community-driven media reform.
Over the past two years, kate. was awarded three writing residencies — one from Mesa Refuge, and two from Blue Mountain Center — as well as a generous grant from News Futures (NF), a community of practice focused on information equity, to develop a book proposal on radically reimagining the media system. From 2021 to 2023, she wrote a regular column called Mediaquake, about the breakdown of the media system under modern capitalism, for the alt-global magazine Popula. Beginning in 2023, she has worked closely with New York Focus, New York’s only statewide nonprofit newsroom, to run a statewide community listening tour and publish groundbreaking research about the information needs of New Yorkers. Previously, kate lead the News Quality Initiative at the City University of New York (CUNY), where she organized interdisciplinary panels of leading scholars and journalists to publish research on the quality of news online; she also worked as a staff reporter at NewsGuard, a researcher at WIRED magazine, a reporter at Mother Jones magazine, and as a journalist at numerous other local and national outlets across the United States.
She is regularly invited to speak about reimagining the media system; in the past year, she was invited to speak on this topic at major journalism conferences, on notable podcasts, on radio stations across New York, and elsewhere. She was also invited to serve on a committee of ten scholars, journalists, and advocates who co-authored the Media Power Collaborative’s Local News Policy Agenda For the People, the only major community-rooted policy agenda for local news of its kind. A long time member of the National Writers Union’s freelancers chapter, she co-leads the union’s media economy group and journalism policy advocacy efforts. Her work has been cited by numerous outlets (The Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, MSNBC, Vox, & more), policy & advocacy organizations (Southern Poverty Law Center, Planned Parenthood, and Free Press, for example), and federal policymakers.
She also has a background in documentary film screenwriting and production. She recently co-produced The Highest Standard (2023), a forthcoming feature documentary film about the education system in the United States, and worked as a producer and writer on the six-part documentary series, She Creates Change (2023), which examines the role of education for teenage girls around the world. She is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, where the majority of her tuition was funded by a national Foreign Language and Area Studies award.
kate has received a variety of awards for her work, including a Society of Professional Journalists award, an Award for Innovation in Communications from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Fellowship at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics, among other honors.
She grew up on the northern edge of the North Country and is primarily based in upstate New York.