My name is John Hendel and I’m a writer and journalist
living in Washington, D.C. In June of 2012, I began covering telecommunications for Communications Daily, a family-owned, D.C.-based publication that’s led industry reporting since 1945, and have enjoyed the hell out of the job so far. My beat is all 50 states and their regulatory commissions as well as legislatures and the focus is high-level policy, law, politics, and regulation in a rich field that’s evolving constantly.
Before this gig, I reported on D.C. transportation in all its forms for TBD’s On Foot blog for a year, and then before that, I spent a year working as a writer and web producer for The Atlantic magazine as part of their fellowship program. I became comfortable writing about everything from streetcars to Andrei Tarkovsky to transit delays to “the right to be forgotten.”
In the fall of 2009, I earned a Master of Arts in journalism from the University of Missouri. Narrative journalism captured my imagination in grad school, and I explored its potential in graduate-level journalism and English courses. I also completed a 140-page graduate thesis, for which I conducted quantitative research examining how snark affects newsreaders. In May 2008, I graduated from the University of Missouri with bachelor’s degrees in magazine journalism and history.
In addition to my studies at the University of Missouri, I’ve also worked and studied abroad three times in recent years: in the summer of ’09 I spent five weeks in South Korea, where I taught English in a camp for Korean elementary school students; I lived in London during the spring semester of 2007 and interned for the free expression magazine Index on Censorship; and I practiced my Spanish while living in Cuernavaca, Mexico during the country’s presidential election in the summer of 2006. In 2010, I worked as a producer’s assistant on a feature film and an external affairs intern for the Saint Louis Art Museum. I absolutely love travel, music, literature, and anything that challenges my assumptions about the world around me.
Check out some of my published articles and design work on this website, and feel free to drop me a line regarding anything. I’m generally eager to take on new freelance work and in the past have covered technology, entertainment (film and television), transportation, politics, business, the arts (music, literature, and theatre), health, and free expression issues.
