About me

Hi there. My name is Benjamin Payne.

I’m the Savannah-based journalist for Georgia Public Broadcasting, the statewide NPR network of the Peach State.

I came from the shores of the Mississippi River, in a town called Rock Island, where Illinois meets Iowa, and the River runs east to west.

Journalism is a bit of a Payne family legacy. Growing up I looked up to my father, who was an editor at the Rock Island Argus newspaper at the time. And his father was a reporter at the same paper in the post-war years. I, however, was the black sheep of the family, who chose the radio microphone over the printing press. I ended up graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Multimedia Journalism & Mass Communication in 2016 from Augustana College in Rock Island, and later interning at WBEZ in Chicago.

From there, I came back to Rock Island to work at NPR member station WVIK. There I was the station’s local Morning Edition host, serving the Quad Cities metro area of roughly 400,000 people across western Illinois and eastern Iowa. I also reported spot and feature news for WVIK, edited some of the station’s podcasts, and reported some stories for NPR that were broadcast nationally (such as this one and this one).

In December 2020, I graduated with a Master of Arts in journalism from the University of Nevada, Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism, where I also instructed undergraduates as a teaching assistant. Along the way, I freelanced, including for NPR and Marketplace, covering the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 election and renewable energy development.

Thanks for visiting! I’d love to chat more with you soon.

— @benjaminpayne