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Episode 25: Danelle Morton

Sep 27, 2022

“The same skills that allowed me to uncover a bid-rigging scandal in local government also are applicable to Jennifer Aniston’s latest haircut,” says veteran reporter and collaborator Danelle Morton. “A journalism skill is a journalism skill.”

Indeed it is—especially when it is practiced at the crosshairs of journalism and celebrity, where Danelle worked for many years at The New York Times, The San Jose Mercury News, and People magazine, developing her nose for news and learning how to meet a deadline. 

Those instincts coalesced in Danelle’s work as the co-writer of more than a dozen books, including three New York Times best-sellers. She’s worked with such headline-making personalities as actress and activist Jane Fonda (What Can I Do: My Path From Climate Despair to Action); one-time DNC chair and noted political operative Donna Brazile (Hacks); Jenny Sanford, wife of former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (Staying True); and former NFL quarterback Rodney Peete (Not My Boy). Among her career highlights, she says, was the friendship she developed with the actress Doris Roberts, after the two worked together on Roberts’s best-selling memoir (Are You Hungry, Dear?), a collaboration that led to a ghostwriting gig with “Everybody Loves Raymond” creator Phil Rosenthal (You’re Lucky You’re Funny).  

All the while, Danelle continued to write in her own voice for newspapers in magazine and has received many awards and honors for her investigative work; she was nominated for the prestigious ASME National Magazine Award in the public service category, and was named a finalist for the PEN/USA Literary Non-Fiction Award. 

Danelle is the creator and host of the podcast “City of the Rails,” which debuts on the iHeartRadio Podcast Network on Oct. 26, 2022, and examines the terrible beauty of a life in and around the rails—“the kind of beauty that a lot of us will never see, because it’s only available to you out the open door of a freight car.” She was drawn to the subject when her daughter dropped out of school to hop trains, and in a desperate effort to understand her daughter and keep tabs on her when she went missing for over a year and a half, Danelle got out her reporter’s notebook and started chasing a deeply personal story that would come to stamp her career as a journalist.  

Read more about Danelle on her website and follow her on Twitter.

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