About Scott Thomas Anderson
Scott Thomas Anderson is a California journalist whose work regularly appears in The San Francisco Chronicle and The Sacramento News & Review. A 2018 Fellow for The USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, he’s written for a diverse range of publications, from The Irish Independent to Distiller’s Magazine. Scott’s also the writer and producer of the documentary podcast series, “Drinkers with Writing Problems.”
Investigations and Embedded Work
For more than 16 years, Scott’s primarily covered American crime, the drug world, environmental threats and the impacts of poverty. He’s been awarded the California News Publishers Association’s highest honors for feature writing, governmental coverage, agricultural reporting and breaking news. Scott’s been interviewed about homicide investigations nationally on the Travel Channel, and internationally on Ireland’s Radio 1: Drivetime.
Between May 2010 and October 2011, Scott spent 18 months as an embedded reporter with California law enforcement agencies, partnering with officers on night patrols, accompanying detectives on warrant searches and probation sweeps, observing SWAT operations and spending hundreds of hours with attorneys and victims’ advocates in small-town courtrooms. During this time, he also traveled to different rural communities across the United States. The result was his nonfiction book, Shadow People: How Meth-driven Crime is Eating at the Heart of Rural America, an exploration of the nation’s modern methamphetamine crisis. In April 2015, his second nonfiction book was released, The Cutting Four-piece: Crime and Tragedy in an Era of Prison Overcrowding.
Travel and Cultural Exploration
In recent years, Scott has balanced his hard news focus with cultural reporting and travel journalism, filing pieces on his time spent in Mexico, Greece, Croatia, Spain, Italy, Ireland, Scotland and Southern France. In 2019, he produced his first documentary podcast series, “Drinkers with Writing Problems,” which travels to cities around the world to study the link between drinking culture and creative legacies. That series is live on iTunes and Stitcher.
Contact Scott at standerson1@live.com.
