Jay Field
Jay Field is a reporter for MPBN Radio based in the network’s Bangor bureau. In his reporting for the network’s flagship program, Maine Things Considered, Field enjoys exploring how real people’s lives are impacted by the unique policy challenges, economic, education, natural resource and otherwise, that come with daily life in a rural state.
Prior to joining MPBN, Field was based in Evanston, Illinois, where he filed freelance stories for NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, Marketplace and The World, and worked as a staff reporter for WBEZ-FM in Chicago. At WBEZ, Field helped launch an education desk, spent four years reporting, in-depth, on the nation’s third largest school system and covered general assignment news. Field began his public radio career as an intern and contributing reporter at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, where he filed stories for KQED News and The California Report.
Field has received many honors and awards for his work. In 2012, his series on Maine’s prescription drug monitoring program was honored in the Public Affairs category by the Maine Association of Broadcasters. In 2007, Field won a national Sigma Delta Chi award for Radio Investigative Reporting for a series on overcrowding and disciplinary problems at a high school on Chicago’s South Side. That same year, Field was also part of a team of WBEZ journalists who contributed to the series Chicago Matters: Valuing Education, which won the Casey Medal for Meritous Journalism, which honors distinguished coverage of disadvantaged children, youth and families. In 2006, Field was honored with the national Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists in the Radio Feature Reporting category for a two-month series on school truancy in Rockford, Illinois. In 2005, the National Headliner Awards honored Field for his ongoing coverage of school finance challenges in a poor suburb on south of Chicago, near the Indiana border. Field has been a finalist for the Daniel Schorr Journalism Prize. His work has also been honored by the Chicago Headline Club, the Illinois Associated Press, Public Radio News Directors Incorporated and the National Federation of Community Broadcasters.
Field graduated from Colby College, earning a B.A. in English.
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Factory output in the U.S. has gone up for the ninth straight month, but in many rural, one-industry towns, financial hardship continues. In the Northern Maine community of Millinocket, local leaders are racing the clock to reopen two paper mills before they shut down for good, are disassembled and sold for scrap. Hundreds of jobs and the already-fragile economies of two communities are at risk.
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Thousands of biathlon competitors and fans have gathered in rural Aroostook County in Maine for the sport's World Cup. More than 10 years ago, Aroostook, traditionally a hub for potato farming and logging, hatched a plan to reverse the stagnant wage growth and high unemployment that plague so many sparsely populated areas. The county already drew large numbers of snowmobilers to its network of well-groomed trails. So Aroostook set out to build on that base — by capitalizing on its long history of superb cross-country skiing and transforming itself into one of the world's premier Nordic sports destinations.