Throughout her childhood, Samantha Max was what’s known in National Public Radio circles as “a backseat listener.”
“We listened [to NPR] pretty much every day to and from school, and in the kitchen,” says Max, a graduate of the Krieger Schechter and Park schools. “I loved ‘This American Life,’ ‘Car Talk,’ ‘Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me.’”
These days, the 26-year-old Baltimore native is still an NPR fan. In fact, six months ago Max became a public safety reporter for New York City’s WNYC-FM, NPR’s most listened-to member station.
“I still can’t believe I’m actually here,” says Max, who lives in Harlem. “To be able to be at WNYC, this local news space that is actually in a period of growth right now, is a really exciting opportunity.”
A graduate of the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University, Max made sure to find diverse internship opportunities exposing her to all forms of journalism while in college. The summer after her freshman year, she interned at WYPR’s “Midday with Dan Rodricks.”
“That was a moment in time when [Freddie Gray’s death] was a big part of the conversation happening in Baltimore,” Max says. “We had the police commissioner on the radio, we had the mayor on.”
The following summer, she returned to WYPR and worked in the newsroom. “That was the summer when several of the police officers [involved with Freddie Gray’s killing] were on trial,” she says. “It kind of planted a seed in my head of questions about how the laws are written, how the system works, what the responsibilities of police officers are.”
Max’s next internship was with Northwestern’s Investigative Reporting Center, where she says she investigated a “potentially wrongful conviction.” The case reinforced many of her questions and concerns about the criminal justice system, as well as increased her interest in investigative and community journalism.
While preparing to graduate, Max says she “cast a wide net,” applying to 75 newsrooms across the nation. “The opportunity that really excited me was this new program called Report for America, which is similar to Teach for America,” she says. “It was recruiting young reporters to work at small local newsrooms across the country.”
Max was accepted into the program and sent to Macon, Georgia, where she worked for a local newspaper.
“[Being in Macon] was a real eye-opening experience for a lot of reasons, partially just being in the Deep South and partially being at a corporately owned newspaper where everyone was being laid off or bought out around me,” she says. “I was a 22-year-old writing the front-page Sunday story almost every week, which was definitely exciting.”
Max’s next move was to Nashville, where she became WPLN-FM’s full-time criminal justice system reporter. In the three years she spent at the Tennessee public radio station, she covered several capital punishment cases and even witnessed an execution by electric chair. She covered George Floyd’s killing and the ensuing protests, as well as investigated allegations of sexual misconduct and racism within the Nashville Police Department.
“It was definitely a lot of heavy stuff,” says Max. “But I really love covering the criminal justice system because I think that [for] a lot of people who aren’t directly impacted by it … it’s just completely out-of-sight, out-of-mind for them. I like being able to tell stories that humanize the system that can be really anonymizing. And there’s a real balance of being able to tell stories that hold people to account but also allow me to connect with different kinds of people, whether it’s police officers, people in prison, attorneys.”
Last year, Max was hired by WNYC and is part of a team of three reporters focusing mostly on gun violence, police misconduct and the legal system.
“Public safety kind of touches everything,” she says. “So if there’s an announcement about crime on the subway, I’m talking to our transit reporter, or if there’s something happening with the mayor, a former police officer, I can be in touch with City Hall. … There are a lot of reporters in New York City, but there are not many local reporters. I think local journalism is so important to democracy and helping people understand the community that they live in.
“I feel really grateful to have found this job. It was not the first job that I applied for, but it was the one that I really wanted,” Max says. “Sometimes, life just kind of works out that way.”
Israeli-Americans Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin talked about the pain of losing their 23-year-old son, who was kidnapped and later murdered in the Oct. 7th tragedy.
A committed philanthropist and community leader, Russel was president of R&H Motors.
The mother of four was a native of Winchester, Virginia, who spent most of her life in Northwest Baltimore.
The Columbia resident worked on the Gemini and Apollo space missions.