Karen Given

Karen Given is developing an ORA Research grant based on narrative journalism. She is leading narrative storytelling workshops and also producing a podcast series to share the voices of community-based change makers.

She has worked in radio since she was 16 years old, getting her start at a small commercial music station in Joshua Tree, California.

Karen spent more than 20 years with WBUR and NPR’s Only A Game. She started as the show’s Technical Director and worked her way up to Executive Producer and Interim Host. Along the way, she won the national Edward R. Murrow Award for Sports Reporting twice — in 2007 and 2017.

For most of the show’s 27-year run, Only A Game was a straightforward public radio style newsmagazine. But in 2014, the station decided to switch to a narrative format. The only problem was, no one knew how to do it.

It was Karen’s job to figure out how to make narrative stories. She sought out all of the common wisdom and developed some “best practices” of her own. Now, she shares the lessons she learned with podcasters and public radio newsrooms.