Karen Breslau

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT KAREN BRESLAU

I\'m excited to be joining Bloomberg News as California Bureau Chief. My approach is informed by two decades of reporting from California\'s frontlines of change, uncovering stories that have proven to have national and global impact, and in my subsequent roles advising decision-makers grappling with hard choices. As a journalist and a strategist, I’ve developed a deep understanding of many building blocks of California’s economy and culture - higher education, housing, water, agriculture and infrastructure. As the world\'s fifth largest economy and a crucible of social and political change, I look forward to helping Bloomberg deliver deep, nuanced stories that reveal California in all its complexity, diversity, challenges and ambition. Here\'s my backstory: I filed my first story when I was 6 years old from Tachikawa Air Force Base in Japan, where my father was stationed as a flight surgeon for the U.S. Air Force. Once a week, my brother and I recorded impressions of our life in Japan on audio cassettes that we mailed to our grandparents in the Bronx. I signed off on each dispatch like a squeaky-voiced Walter Cronkite. That childhood passion led to a long and satisfying journalism career at NPR and Newsweek, where I was a foreign, State Department and White House correspondent, covering revolutions, coups, wars and presidential elections–which come to think of it, felt sedate by comparison. I am drawn to big, big stories. Narratives are my specialty, and the use of narrative as a tool to make sense of the world and the ways in which it changes inspired me to launch Feature Well Stories, my live journalism and thought leadership planning agency. As a journalist, author and communicator, I prize deep and genuine collaboration with colleagues and clients, seasoned by humor and a healthy respect for the role of history and culture in shaping the political world.