NORTHWEST EXPLORER
Cascade PBS | 2024–Present
Role: Host & Producer
Northwest Explorer is a short-form travel and culture series from Cascade PBS Creative Works exploring the people, places, food, arts and experiences that shape the Pacific Northwest.
The series began with a simple client need: Love Kitsap was looking for a more dynamic way to promote tourism and tell the story of its region. As a team, we began thinking about how Cascade PBS could create short-form sponsored content that was useful to clients while still feeling community-focused, editorially thoughtful and aligned with the values audiences associate with public media.
That became Northwest Explorer.
From there, we developed the series into a repeatable client product and began pitching it to organizations across the region. Every Northwest Explorer partnership starts as a business relationship: our team identifies a potential client, develops a story package around their goals, pitches the concept, and works with them to shape a set of episodes that can showcase their destination, organization, event or community in a way that feels useful to viewers rather than purely promotional.
Since its launch, we’ve produced more than 100 episodes across the region, traveling from communities throughout Puget Sound and the Olympic Peninsula to Bellingham, Wenatchee, Prosser, Pullman and beyond. Along the way, the series has featured artists, small businesses, cultural institutions, restaurants, outdoor destinations, festivals, tourism organizations and the people who give each place its character.
THE GROWTH
What began as a new sponsored-content concept quickly became the fastest-growing product within Cascade PBS Creative Works.
The series has grown through a steady stream of successful client partnerships across tourism, arts and culture, hospitality, local business, museums, festivals and destination marketing. Many of those relationships have led to repeat business, which has become one of the clearest indicators of the product’s value.
In fact, our very first client, Love Kitsap, has continued to return to the series and is bringing us back for a third round of episodes in fall 2026.
Within its first six months, Northwest Explorer surpassed the organization’s largest annual event in sponsorship revenue. One featured organization, the Pacific Northwest Quilt & Fiber Arts Museum, later reported a 30% year-over-year increase in exhibit attendance after investing much of its marketing budget in its Northwest Explorer feature.
For clients, the series offers something beyond a traditional commercial: a chance to tell a place-based story through the voice and visual language of public media.
RESPONSIBILITIES
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On-camera hosting, narration, field interviews, improvisation and public representation of the series.
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Story pitching, concept development, destination and subject research, scripting, interview development and editorial planning from initial concept through post-production.
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Lead identification, client pitching, partnership development, relationship management and repeat-client cultivation. I work directly with clients to understand their goals and translate them into stories that feel engaging to viewers while delivering value to the client.
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Location scouting, shoot planning, production logistics, adapting scripts and story direction as new information emerges during the shoot, and collaborating with the production team on visual storytelling.
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Voiceover, editorial review, story shaping and collaboration with editors to bring each piece through final delivery.
EXPANDING THE FORMAT: TAKE FIVE
The success of Northwest Explorer also helped inspire a new spin-off product in 2026: Take Five, an even shorter-form series built around five questions, with each response running approximately 60 seconds or less and filmed in a different setting.
The format gives existing clients another way to extend their campaigns while allowing us to work with businesses and organizations whose stories may not naturally fit Northwest Explorer’s travel and destination-focused format. It expands the model beyond tourism and place-based storytelling while keeping the conversational, personality-driven approach that made the original series successful.
I also host Take Five, carrying that same approach into a faster, more flexible format designed to work across a much broader range of clients.