About

I’m Elise Hu. A political junkie since I was just a lowercase E, I covered the races and faces of Texas politics for half a decade before joining NPR as the digital coordinator of its StateImpact initiative. The project is aimed at strengthening state government coverage in several states by bringing to bear digital tools and deep-dive reporting to public policy issues.

Election Night 2006, waiting for Perry victory party to start

Before my current venture, I was a founding journalist at The Texas Tribune, where I led multimedia efforts, television partnerships and experimented with new story forms but also contributed old-school reporting to the Tribune and its partners at The New York Times.

A former television reporter, I worked from 2006-2009 at KVUE-TV in Austin and served Belo Corp-owned sister stations, KENS-TV (SA), KHOU-TV (Houston) and WFAA-TV (Dallas), where I was a regular contributor to its Sunday morning politics program.

My work background includes time outside of Texas, too. I followed the political animals of South Carolina and their wild ways, covered the hurly-burly 2002 US Senate race between Jim Talent and Jean Carnahan in Missouri (Talent won) and spent much of my 5th grade year studying in great detail the presidential primary bid of once and future California Governor Jerry Brown.

I prefer prose over poetry, hobbies over habits and mayo over mustard. I love salmon nigiri, long chats with my mom and the time of year when the sun stays out real late.

Previously in my 29 years (and not in this order) I… lived with an Asian boy band (resulting in a lot of karaoke), worked as a teen model, lifted a lot of monstrous gear to earn a journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia, consumed thousands of hot dogs, spent the strangest two years of my life in Spartanburg, South Carolina (where I actually covered a man-on-dog rape), got my homes and cars burglarized a combined four times, followed my jet-setting mom and dad on travels around the globe, interviewed Barack Obama in a bathroom, and in 2001, I started blogging when they were called “web journals”.

That proved to be a good decision.

CONTACT ME

Home email: elisehu@gmail.com
Work email: ehu@npr.org
Skype: elisehu
Twitter: @elisewho

COUNTRIES VISITED

visited 30 states (13.3%)
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