About
I was born in Santa Rosa, California in 1974. My parents are traveling missionaries, so culture and diversity have always been a big part of my worldview. I've seen war zones and wide open spaces. I've written about the lives of people in remote Bosnian villages and I've filmed the breaching of a dam on one of the world's largest superfund sites. I look for commonalities, because at the heart of everything we do, every issue we face, there are people. And each person has a story to tell.
I'm often asked how I got into journalism. And I tell people it all started in a bomb shelter in Albania. In 1999, while working with American psychiatrists trying to mitigate the affects of war atrocities on small children fleeing from Kosovo, a friend asked me why I spent so much time writing about what happened each day. I told him it was the only way to make sense of the things I saw. In a world where war scrambled the images and thoughts that hold a day together, I needed words to put some order to the chaos. As we sat there under three-feet-thick concrete walls meant to protect against the stray bullets fired off nightly, he said I should become a journalist to help the world make sense of what it sees every day. Those words came back to me when I enrolled in community college back in my hometown less than a year later.
Almost a decade after that conversation, I'm still working with words to make some sense of the chaos in our world. But those words are not always seen in print. Sometimes they are spoken as in a voiceover for a video about changes in our small city in the Northern Rockies. Sometimes they are in the ramblings of a member of our community whose own story can help others make sense of the sweeping changes that affect us every day.
Today I combine images, sound and words to tell stories that help break down educational and institutional barriers. Journalism is the only way I know to affect these changes, and I embrace any form of communication that is cross-generational, cross-platform and cross-cultural.
Thanks for reading,
Tim Akimoff