Say hello, Alex.
alex@alexandraleighyoung.com
I was born with a top 40 song stuck in my head. Janet Jackson’s Control and Queen’s Greatest Hits were the first cassette tapes I ever owned. My pop-music dreams came true in college when I got a gig in concert production and went on tour with Third Eye Blind, New Kids On The Block, Nick Lachey, and many more. After graduating from UC Berkeley in 2007, I moved to New York City where I ran an audio post-production house called Explosion Robinson. While there, I produced music and sound design for TV shows and video games like Ru Paul’s Drag Race, and Dance Central.
I was awarded an artist residency in South Korea in 2014, where I fell in love with a new kind of music: K-pop. After spending a year reporting on South Korea’s music industry, I returned to the US and produced my first podcast episode for Radiolab, called “K-poparazzi.” The episode was the inspiration for my debut YA novel, Idol Gossip (Walker US/Candlewick 2021).
I’m currently the deputy producer for The New York Times’ #1-ranked news podcast, The Daily. In addition to “The Daily,” I’ve reported and produced several other podcasts for The Times, including “Dear Sugars,” an audio advice column hosted by Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond, and “Change Agent,” a podcast series that unearths surprising stories from science and business to offer answers to people’s problems. I also produced “The Coronavirus Goes Global,” for “The Daily,” which was part of a Times series that received the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for public service.