Former reporter, assistant editor named editor of the Taos News
The Taos News is pleased to announce that former reporter and assistant editor John Miller accepted the position of editor in June and has been running the newsroom for the past four months.
Miller spent five years as a reporter for the Taos News, working for two years as its assistant editor under former editor, Staci Matlock.
Born and raised in the Portland, Oregon, area, Miller attended Jesuit High School and graduated from the University of Denver in 2012. He studied writing at University College Cork in the Republic of Ireland. Shortly after graduating, he began a career as a freelance writer, work he continued after arriving in Taos in late 2014.
He was drawn to Taos, in part, because his father had worked in the area as a construction worker in the 1970s. Both voracious readers, his parents instilled in him a passion for reading and writing at an early age.
While he freelanced, Miller worked as a manager on duty at the Taos Inn. In 2015, he began writing for Tempo, the newspaper’s arts and entertainment magazine, and for its special sections. He continued to write articles and waited tables at local restaurants for a year and a half as he sought a staff position with the Taos News.
In 2016, he was hired to be the newspaper’s copy editor under editor Damon Scott. A few months later, Miller was promoted to public safety reporter.
In that capacity, Miller covered numerous court cases, car crashes, wildfires and other emergencies around Northern New Mexico. He won 18 state and national awards for his work, notably for his coverage of the August 2018 “Amalia compound raid” and for a series of stories that explored the effects of the opioid epidemic on the region. During his time as a reporter, he appeared as a guest on the CBC and interviewed with BBC Radio and KNX Newsradio in Los Angeles.
As a journalist, Miller’s philosophy is to be rigorously fair and ethical, to ensure that reporters always represent all sides of any topic they report on. In his free time, he can be found hiking around Taos County or snowboarding in the mountains during winter.
“I am pleased that we have someone of John’s caliber to hit the ground running and lead our newsroom,” says Taos News publisher, Chris Baker. “As a longtime reporter and our assistant editor for two years, he has been instrumental in leading the Taos News’ efforts to understand how we can provide information in print and online that is central to our readers’ lives. He has proven time and time again to be an inspiring and innovative journalist with a knack for finding the best ways to tell stories across all platforms.”