Julia Donovan
Julia Donovan covers weather and Colorado’s mountain communities for KRDO NewsChannel 13, focusing on how conditions in the high country affect safety, travel, and everyday life. Her coverage blends daily hazard tracking with on-the-ground reporting from mountain towns and outdoor destinations, tying forecasts to the realities people face in storms, fire seasons, and tourist-heavy landscapes.
Weather alerts and hazard coverage
On the weather team, Donovan delivers fast, focused segments on near-term threats, including widespread severe storms, heavy rain, flooding, heat, and critical fire danger. Recent pieces have warned of days with “widespread severe storms possible” and broken down how shifting systems will move from one more hot day into cooler, wetter conditions.
She tracks “heavy rain & flooding chances” and “widespread flooding chances,” emphasizing timing, rainfall totals, and which areas face the greatest risk. Her fire coverage explains how gusty winds, dry fuels, and smoke combine into “another critical fire danger day” and aligns Red Flag Warnings with practical guidance on outdoor plans.
The through-line is direct service: she treats forecasts as public safety reporting, built to help viewers decide when to stay off the roads, avoid exposed terrain, and prepare for fast-changing conditions.
Mountain Beat: tourism, history, and environment
Donovan’s mountain beat work takes her into high-country towns grappling with tourism, heritage, and environmental limits. In “Locals vs. Tourists in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains,” she travels to Ouray to examine how a destination community balances the needs of residents, the local economy, and the surrounding environment as visitor numbers grow.
That report surfaces concrete impacts from crowds, including trampling of vegetation, erosion, and human waste, and frames them as a management problem for land stewards and town leaders.
In “Experiencing the history of Cripple Creek,” she shows how a former gold-mining town has transformed and highlights ways people can engage with its past through museums, sites, and attractions. A “mountain beat” report from South Fork focuses on locals trying new things and persevering through challenges, tying personal stories to the resilience of small communities on the edge of the San Juans.
Across these pieces, she treats mountain towns as living systems where tourism, environment, and local identity intersect, rather than as scenery or travel promotion.
High Country Adventures and survival reporting
Donovan extends her environmental and outdoors focus through immersive segments that place her directly in Colorado’s backcountry. In the High Country Adventures series, she joins The Survival University’s new rappelling course in Teller County, using her own experience on the ropes to showcase “the coolest ways to explore Colorado’s natural beauty.”
The segment centers on practical skills and safety - gear, instruction, and how to approach steep terrain responsibly - while still highlighting the thrill of the activity. Her “Julia vs. The Wild” survival blog follows a multi-day challenge in the wilderness, with viewers invited to follow along as she builds shelter, navigates terrain, manages unpredictable weather, and adjusts to life off the grid. The blog promises daily recaps, behind-the-scenes moments, photos, and extra updates from her time in the woods, extending her on-air reporting into a running field diary.
This strand of her work distinguishes her from desk-based environment coverage by showing what living “out in the elements” looks like and what it demands from people on the ground.
Accountability and everyday safety
Donovan also reports on everyday safety and accountability in the local built environment, including restaurant inspections and public health enforcement. In a Restaurant Roundup piece on a taco shop temporarily closed after a dozen health violations, she contrasts the shuttered business with a busy competitor that cleared its inspection, using the story to explain what violations mean for customers and how oversight works in practice. Her professional history includes time away from news to work at a major Colorado law firm, where she shared car crash survivors’ stories and advocated for their justice.
That experience feeds into her stated goal of keeping people safe in the elements and gives her hazard coverage a human-rights dimension, whether the risk comes from roads, storms, or unsafe establishments.
Background and focus
Donovan’s author biography describes a longstanding “passion for nature, storytelling, and connecting with the community,” which underpins her mix of weather, mountain beat, and outdoor adventure reporting. Before going on air, she worked as a writer at multiple news stations in Boston, building newsroom experience that now informs her field pieces and live segments.
She began her on-air career as a reporter at KRDO in 2019 and later returned to NewsChannel 13 after her period in legal advocacy, explicitly to help keep people safe outside. KRDO’s team listings place her on the Weather Team, and her bylines span alerts, adventure features, and mountain-town profiles, marking out a hybrid beat at the intersection of environment, lifestyle, and public safety.
Across formats - newscast segments, written articles, and a survival blog - she stays close to real conditions in the mountains and uses clear, practical language to link those conditions to the choices people make every day.
4 more environment journalists.
Alan Halaly
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Alejandra Borunda
Alejandra Borunda reports on how climate change affects human health for NPR. Her work treats global warming as a direct cause of physical and mental health risks. She covers extreme heat, including undercounted deaths, lost sleep and local efforts to track heat-related fatalities. She also reports on wildfire smoke, hurricanes, disease spread such as dengue fever, trauma, stress and unequal health impacts. Her stories examine how communities protect themselves and recover, as well as practical solutions involving climate-resilient crops, agriculture and diet. Before NPR, she wrote about climate science and environmental issues for National Geographic, including glacier retreat, shade and heat inequity, and shrinking ice-fishing seasons. A former climate scientist, she combines field reporting with scientific data to connect atmospheric research to everyday risks, choices and people’s lived experiences.
Alex Lubben
Alex Lubben is an environment reporter at The Times-Picayune/The Advocate who connects climate risk to policy, industry and community change. He covers Gulf warming, flood protection, coastal restoration, wetlands litigation, industrial projects such as SpaceX’s possible expansion, invasive species and local ecosystems. His reporting tracks how law, politics and corporate decisions shape levees, drainage, marshes and long-term resilience. He also examines climate relocation, housing and labor, showing how hurricanes, floods and wildfires displace vulnerable communities and expose gaps in government systems. He works on a small environment team and brings an investigative background to document work, data analysis, legal and policy research, and field reporting. His work has appeared in VICE News, The Center for Public Integrity, The Nation, Jewish Currents and NBC News.
Alex Wigglesworth
Alex Wigglesworth reports on how climate, land use and public policy shape California communities. She covers the Inland Empire and Mojave Desert for the Los Angeles Times and is part of its environment team. Her beat includes wildfires, megadrought, extreme weather, desert development, conservation, wildlife, industrial hazards, aging infrastructure and regulatory enforcement. She has covered Western Joshua trees, desert tortoises, beaver-led restoration, toxic lead pipes, air-quality concerns after industrial fires and the effects of nuclear war on food systems. Earlier, she was a general assignment reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com. She combines breaking news with detailed reporting grounded in scientific studies, modeling and expert interviews. Her work connects fires, drought and other hazards to climate change, while examining how agencies, companies and land-use decisions affect people and ecosystems.