David Sommerstein
David Sommerstein, a contributor from North Country Public Radio (NCPR), has covered the St. Lawrence Valley, Thousand Islands, Watertown, Fort Drum and Tug Hill regions since 2000. Sommerstein has reported extensively on agriculture in New York State, Fort Drum’s engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the lives of undocumented Latino immigrants on area dairy farms. He’s won numerous national and regional awards for his reporting from the Associated Press, the Public Radio News Directors Association, and the Radio-Television News Directors Association. He's regularly featured on NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Only a Game, and PRI’s The World.
Sommerstein started his career in radio as a sit-in jazz and Latin DJ at Buffalo NPR affiliate WBFO. He’s a huge baseball fan, speaks fluent Spanish, and hosts a bilingual music show featuring funk, hip hop, Latin and world beats, called The Beat Authority.
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Beat Nation is a traveling art exhibition that mines the similarities between hip-hop and indigenous culture. It's made a big splash in Canada, where indigenous protest movements have recently captured headlines. -
A dozen universities are collaborating on a sort of extreme winemaking project: How cold a climate can a grape survive and still make good wine? The Northern Grapes Project is inventing wines the world has never seen before, winning wine awards and creating a new crop for struggling rural economies.
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An indigenous protest movement is shaking Canadian politics. Idle No More is against a bill that native people say threatens their treaty rights. One chief is almost a month into a hunger strike.
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The expiration of the farm bill has left dairy farmers without a milk pricing program — and a safety net. While all farmers are watching closely, milk producers face an environment where cow feed costs more than cow milk. -
Soldiers at Fort Drum in Watertown, N.Y., say they are not surprised by the news that more of them will be deploying to Afghanistan. Most of them seem resigned to spending more time in combat, but they say it will be hard on their families.
