Jesse's first job in journalism was at a local newspaper the summer he graduated high school, which is a sentence that sounds like a humble-brag until you remember what local newspapers pay. He kept doing it anyway — through an internship at NBC News, through years producing for the TODAY show, through documentary work at A&E and the History Channel that required him to care, on a professional level, about things like Prohibition-era rum runners and whatever renovation show was airing that quarter. The through-line, if there is one, is that he's spent his career trying to find the one true thing buried inside a story that everyone else has already decided is simple.
He applies the same logic to his free time, which is either admirable or a sign that he doesn't know how to stop working. A few years ago he kayaked the entire Connecticut River alone — Canadian headwaters to Long Island Sound, eleven days, no one to blame but himself for any of it — and then wrote about it, because apparently suffering isn't real until there's a draft. He grew up skateboarding and snowboarding in the way an entire generation did, shot his first film on Super 8 about the kids he skated with, and co-founded a children's e-book company called Wobbly Top Press, which is either the most or least logical career pivot available to a documentary producer, depending on how you feel about children.
He is, in the end, mostly interested in the same question no matter what he's working on: what does this actually look like up close, and why did nobody bother to check before now.
