Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Host, NPR’s Weekend Edition
@lourdesgnavarro
On air, Lulu Garcia-Navarro’s voice is warm and inviting, revealing a love for radio that developed when she was a graduate-degree broadcast student in London. Radio benefitted from the fact her school couldn’t afford a TV studio.
“The power of the human voice on your imagination hooked me,” says Garcia-Navarro, who spent decades as a correspondent for National Public Radio, in Latin America, Iraq, Israel and elsewhere. In disparate places, the commonality was Garcia-Navarro’s persistence to go beyond headlines and focus on the human stories. This, she says, came from living full time in most of the countries she covered. There was no parachuting in. At every turn it was about “really trying to understand the people whose stories I’m telling.”
Garcia-Navarro’s sense of empathy is on par with her acuity. In 2017, she became the Sunday host of NPR’s Weekend Edition, where she interviews all manner of authors, politicians, experts, musicians. Her favorite interview, however, will surprise you: “it’s the average person who has had something extraordinary happen to them.” Garcia-Navarro says it’s because “journalism weaves together a narrative about the moment we are living in now, and for me the most gratifying and illuminating stories are those told by people who rarely get asked to talk about their lives.”
Her first big shot came when a veteran reporter at The Associated Press, Karen Sloan hired her as a freelancer after having been an intern out of j-school. One day during the Kosovo conflict she asked Garcia-Navarro if she was willing to cover the war. “I went and it changed my life,” she says. “I don’t know what kind of career I would have had if she hadn’t given me my first big break.”
Today Garcia-Navarro’s award-winning trajectory includes a George Foster Peabody Award, a Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Alliance for Women and the Media's Gracie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement.
For Garcia-Navarro, the El Paso Shooting became a turning point:
“I’ve been a professional journalist for 20 years. But this week, the media failed Latinos in America during what was perhaps our darkest hour in my lifetime.”
The Media Erased Latinos From the Story
With those words, she began an essay for The Atlantic Magazine – The Media Erased Latinos From The Story – that after El Paso has become something of a manifesto for U.S. Latino journalists, capturing the anger that rose amid the post-shooting coverage among this community of reporters.