Colleen Hagerty is a California-based journalist telling narrative stories through video, print, and social mediums. She specializes in covering disasters, including deeply reported features and explainers diving into how policies and technologies impact mitigation, effects, and recovery. You can find her work across BBC News and PBS outputs, as well as in The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Geographic, The Guardian, New York Magazine, Popular Science, Rolling Stone, and High Country News, among other outlets. She also has a newsletter about disasters, My World’s on Fire, which was shortlisted for a 2022 Covering Climate Now award.
Colleen’s freelance reporting has been supported by CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program, the Fuller Project, the International Women’s Media Foundation, the Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources, Media in Color, the Neil Peirce Foundation, and the ACOS Alliance. She’s a 2023 Complicating the Narratives fellow with the Solutions Journalism Network reporting on prescribed fire.
Throughout her career, Colleen has been at the forefront of social news innovation, helping launch NowThis Politics during the 2016 election and snapping, Instagramming, and Facebook Live-ing her way along the campaign trail. Her dispatches amassed millions of views and included candidate interviews, policy analyses, and explainers aimed at first-time voters. In 2017, Colleen was selected for the ICFJ’s Arthur F. Burns independent fellowship to report on the German federal elections. More recently, she was a Video Journalist covering breaking and feature news for BBC World online, which she often worked to tailor for distribution across BBC platforms. She was also the original host and a Senior Producer of the organization’s social series, Cut Through the Noise, helping shape the tone and structure of the weekly newsmagazine.
While she has traveled extensively and lived throughout the US and internationally on assignments, part of her heart will always remain in New York City, where she got her start as a local news reporter covering Queens and Staten Island.