Eleanor Boudreau

Credit Marci Lambert Photography
Reporter

I love living in Memphis, but I'm not from the city. I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I spent many hours at a highly tender age listening to NPR as my parents crisscrossed that city in their car, running errands. I don't amuse myself by musing about the purity of destiny, but I have seriously wondered how different my life would be if my parents preferred classic rock instead of Car Talk.

I studied English at Harvard then spent a year dry-cleaning and writing poems. I went back to school because of my love for public radio journalism and got a master's in broadcast journalism from Columbia University.

I never seriously considered T.V. or print. I love conversation above images, or even words. I spent a summer working as an intern on NPR's opinions and editorials. When it came time to find a job, I mailed a slim envelop from D.C. to WKNO. Inside was a CD. I passed a breezy lunch break sitting in some grass, chatting with Candice and Dan on my cell-phone and when my internship was over, I drove halfway across the country. The rest, as they say, is history -- or, at the very least, it's archived on WKNO-FM's website.

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Election 2012
11:38 pm
Tue March 6, 2012

Results In For Super Tuesday Local Primaries

Credit Eleanor Boudreau
Signs outside the Germantown Performing Arts Centre polling station.

 

Shelby County will have its first elected female District Attorney. Republican Amy Weirich and Democrat Carol Chumney will vie for that position August 2nd.

The property assessor Cheyenne Johnson trounced her opponent in the Democratic primary with 80 percent of the vote. She’ll face off against Republican real estate appraiser Tim Walton. Walton won his three-way primary with 38 percent of the vote.

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Election 2012
6:00 am
Mon March 5, 2012

Property Assessor Primaries Tomorrow

If you’re a renter, you can be forgiven for not knowing what the property assessor does. Here’s how it works: The county commission sets the tax rate per $100 in property value. Then the assessor assigns a value to every piece of property in the county. (All told, it’s 385,000 properties.) The more the assessor says your property is worth, the more you pay in property taxes. The primaries for Shelby County Property Assessor are heated because the last time the property assessor completed a major reassessment was January 1, 2009, just after the housing market collapsed, and a lot of people thought that, given the market at the time, their 2009 assessment was too high. 

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Mid-South News
4:30 pm
Tue January 31, 2012

Turf Wars Imminent Over Schools, Annexation

Turf wars look imminent between the state legislature and the City of Memphis.

A proposed law in the state legislature (Senate Bill 3703 and House Bill 3473) aims to take land in the Memphis annexation area away from the city. The bills were written by Sen.Mark Norris and Rep. Curry Todd, both Republicans from Collierville. Senior Reporter for the Memphis Daily News Bill Dries said suburban lawmakers are trying to dictate city annexation, “Because the annexation is key to the ongoing deliberation about schools consolidation and the possible formation of municipal school districts.”

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Mid-South News
5:01 pm
Mon January 23, 2012

Teachers Nervous About Changes In Evaluations, Pay

Credit Fotolia
As part of their work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation the Memphis City Schools plan to change the way teachers are paid.

Education reformers want to use more data to evaluate and pay teachers, and they’re making headway in Tennessee. Statewide teachers face a more involved evaluation this year, but that evaluation is making some teachers uncomfortable.

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