Gillian Flaccus

Reporter/Video Journalist

Portland, Oregon

Immersive all-formats storyteller. Nuanced writer. Skilled video journalist and breaking-news pro. Experienced beat reporter tackling complex issues. Areas of interest include climate change and water/agricultural issues, Indigenous issues, policing, homelessness and COVID-19's societal impacts.

Gillian Flaccus

Reporter/Video Journalist

Portland, Oregon

Featured
Tribe grapples with missing women crisis on California coast
YUROK RESERVATION, Calif. (AP) — The young mother had behaved erratically for months, hitchhiking and wandering naked through two Native American reservations and a small town clustered along Northern California’s rugged Lost Coast. But things escalated w
AP NEWS
Indigenous issues
Featured
Dwindling Alaska salmon leave Yukon River tribes in crisis
STEVENS VILLAGE, Alaska (AP) — In a normal year, the smokehouses and drying racks that Alaska Natives use to prepare salmon to tide them through the winter would be heavy with fish meat, the fruits of a summer spent fishing on the Yukon River like generations before them. This year, there are no fish.
Climate Change Indigenous Issues Agriculture
Featured
Drought haves, have-nots test how to share water in the West
MADRAS, Ore. Phil Fine stands in a parched field and watches a harvester gnaw through his carrot seed crop, spitting clouds of dust in its wake. Cracked dirt lines empty irrigation canals, and dust devils and tumbleweeds punctuate a landscape in shades of brown. Across an invisible line separating Fine’s irrigation district from the next, it’s another world.
Climate Change Drought Agriculture
Featured
Water crisis reaches boiling point on Oregon-California line
TULELAKE, Calif. Ben DuVal knelt in a barren field near the California-Oregon border and scooped up a handful of parched soil as dust devils whirled around him and birds flitted between empty irrigation pipes. DuVal’s family has farmed the land for three generations, and this summer, for the first time ever, he and hundreds of others who rely on irrigation from a depleted, federally managed lake aren’t getting any water from it at all.
Indigenous Issues Drought Climate Change
Featured
Homes lose water as wells run dry in drought-ravaged basin
MALIN, Ore. Judy and Jim Shanks know the exact date their home’s well went dry — June 24. Since then, their life has been an endless cycle of imposing on relatives for showers and laundry, hauling water to feed a small herd of cattle and desperately waiting for a local well-drilling company to make it to their name on a monthslong wait list.
Drought Climate Change Agriculture
Featured
US tribes see hope for clean water in infrastructure bill
WARM SPRINGS, Ore. Erland Suppah Jr. doesn’t trust what comes out of his faucet. Each week, Suppah and his girlfriend haul a half-dozen large jugs of water from a distribution center run by the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs to their apartment for everything from drinking to cooking to brushing their teeth for their family of five.
Indigenous Issues
Featured
Tiny Oregon town hosts 1st wind-solar-battery ‘hybrid’ plant
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A renewable energy plant in Oregon that combines solar power, wind power and massive batteries to store the energy generated there officially opened Wednesday as the first utility-scale plant of its kind in North America. The project
AP NEWS
climate change
Featured
Oregon fall firestorms cautionary tale in worsening drought
OTIS, Ore. Wildfire smoke was thick when Tye and Melynda Small went to bed on Labor Day, but they weren’t too concerned. After all, they live in a part of Oregon where ferns grow from tree trunks and rainfall averages more than six feet (1.8 meters) a year. But just after midnight, a neighbor awakened them as towering flames, pushed by gusting winds, bore down.
Climate Change
Featured
Sale jumpstarts floating, offshore wind power in US waters
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Tuesday marks the first-ever U.S. auction of leases to develop commercial-scale floating wind farms, in the deep waters off the West Coast. The live, online auction for the five leases — three off California’s central coast and two o
AP NEWS
climate change
Featured
Swarm of sea urchins wreaks destruction on US West Coast
NEWPORT, Ore. Tens of millions of voracious purple sea urchins that have already chomped their way through towering underwater kelp forests in California are spreading north to Oregon, sending the delicate marine ecosystem off the shore into such disarray that other critical species are starving to death.
Climate Change
Featured
Oregon heat wave victims older, lived alone, had no AC
PORTLAND, Ore. Most people who perished in last month’s record-smashing heat wave in Oregon’s most populous county were white, male, older and socially isolated, according to a preliminary report released Tuesday in Portland. Initial tallies show that heat was likely the cause of death for 71 residents of Multnomah County, home to Oregon’s largest city.
Climate Change
Featured
Photos of ‘king tides’ globally show risks of climate change
DEPOE BAY, Ore. A network of volunteer photographers fans out around the globe during so-called king tides to capture how high the waterline gets and where the water goes. They then upload the images — many with geolocation data embedded — for use by scientists, policymakers and even city planners as they study and prepare for the effects of climate change.
Climate Change
Featured
Oregon’s wildfire risk map emerges as new climate flashpoint
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — A new map in Oregon that rated the wildfire risk of every tax lot in the state — labeling nearly 80,000 structures as high-risk — generated so much pushback from angry homeowners that officials abruptly retracted it, saying they had
AP NEWS
Climate Change
Featured
‘Overwhelmed’: Cops combat violent crime as ranks dwindle
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Five years after Brian Spaulding’s parents found him fatally shot in the home he shared with roommates, his slaying remains a mystery that seems increasingly unlikely to be solved as Portland, Oregon, police confront a spike in killi
AP NEWS
Urban Issues Policing
Featured
On Portland's streets: Anger, fear, and a fence that divides
PORTLAND, Ore. The party at the Salmon Street Springs fountain, a riverfront landmark in the heart of Portland, was just getting started. Dozens of drummers beat out entrancing rhythms and a crowd of hundreds danced joyfully as the setting sun cast a soft pink glow on distant Mount Hood. Poster boards bearing the names of dozens of Black men and women killed by police stirred in a gentle breeze as the energy built to fever pitch and more and more people poured into the square.
Protests and Politics
Featured
Portland’s grim reality: 100 days of protests, many violent
PORTLAND, Ore. Once hailed as one of the most livable U.S. cities, Portland, Oregon, is grappling with an uncertain future as it reaches a stunning benchmark: 100 consecutive nights of racial injustice protests marred by vandalism, chaos — and the killing of a supporter of President Donald Trump.
Protests and Politics Urban Issues

About

Gillian Flaccus

writing

interviewing

news photography

reporting

breaking news

video journalism

beat reporting

video editing

video production

I am an accomplished and award-winning video and print reporter with 23 years in journalism.

With 22 of those years at The Associated Press, I excel at covering the biggest breaking news stories in all formats, from earthquakes to wildfires to mass shootings.

Over the years, I have also broken news and produced deeply reported stories on many complex beats, from climate change to homelessness to marijuana legalization to the clergy abuse crisis to California's prison realignment.

I have spent most of my AP career in California and the Pacific Northwest, but the job has taken me all over the U.S. and the world for breaking news, training opportunities and editing assignments.

I got my start with the AP in Portland, Oregon in 2000.

In 2003, I was promoted to diversity and demographics reporter in Los Angeles, where I also took over the religion beat and coverage of the Roman Catholic clergy abuse scandal and subsequent record-breaking civil settlements.

In 2005, I was promoted to Orange County Supervisory Correspondent and oversaw a satellite bureau that covered three diverse counties to the east and south of Los Angeles with a combined population of seven million people.

While in that position, I added video journalism to my reporting skill set and I have become adept at shooting and producing my own spot and feature video packages for the AP.

In 2016, I returned to Portland, Oregon and cover national and international news in the Pacific Northwest, as well as news features.

I was named co-leader of the AP's national beat team covering marijuana legalization and the growth of the cannabis industry in the U.S. and have been an important part of AP's coverage of the societal and political fallout from COVID-19.

I have increasingly focused on climate change and environmental issues in the past two years as the Pacific Northwest has seen rapid changes from global warming. Major wildfires, ice storms, exceptional drought and a warming Pacific Ocean have all battered this region of the U.S. West, making Oregon a key reporting location for the biggest story of our time.

Thank you for taking a look at my stories. Enjoy!