About

Doug Sovern is an award-winning radio journalist, author of fiction, and musician and songwriter.

He is the Political Reporter at KCBS Radio in San Francisco, where he’s been a reporter/anchor since 1990. Winner of more than 250 journalism awards, he began his career at The New York Times and has also worked for Associated Press Radio and San Francisco radio stations K-101 and KGO. Doug hosts the interview program, “The State of California,” exploring issues of politics and public policy, weekday afternoons at 3:30 on KCBS. For more on his journalism career, and to hear selected radio pieces, please click on the RADIO page. To hear some of his pieces from the 2016 election, please click on the ELECTION COVERAGE page.

He is also a writer of fiction. He wrote the groundbreaking Twitter novel “TweetHeart” in 2011—the first work of its kind—and began writing and publishing short stories in 2013. His stories have been featured in Narrative Magazine, Sand Hill Review, Gemini, Black & White, Crack The Spine, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Hobo Pancakes, The Penmen Review, Alimentum, Jet Fuel Review, EDGE, Mulberry Fork Review, J Lit , The Madison Review, Catamaran, Noyo River Review and the anthology The Writers Studio @ 30, and have been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes and the Best of the West. He is currently writing his first conventional novel. From 2015-2019, Doug also hosted THERE, a monthly reading series showcasing Bay Area writers and musicians, at the Octopus Literary Salon in Oakland. For more on his writing career, and to read some of his stories, please click on the FICTION page.

Doug is also a bassist and songwriter.  He is a member of the rock groups Eyewitness Blues Band and The Fallopian Dudes, also performs and does sessions with various singers and other musicians in Oakland and Berkeley, and he wrote and performed political parody songs on KCBS as leader of the Not Ready For Drive Time Singers. In 2019, Doug recorded “Kinds of Blue,” an album of “avant-garde punk blues” with Owen Maercks, Henry Kaiser and Scott Amendola, for the independent label Feeding Tube Records.

For more on his music career, and to hear some of his songs, please click on the MUSIC page.  For his SF Giants version of “Royals” please click on the ROYALS page.

Doug also writes the Sovern Nation blog about national and California politics. For more on the blog, and to view the archives, please click on the SOVERN NATION BLOG page.

Doug is a voracious tweeter. Follow @SovernNation on Twitter for tweets about politics, breaking news, sports, the arts and more. Follow him on Facebook at Doug Sovern, Journalist-Author.

For pictures from across all of the above platforms, please click on the PHOTO GALLERY page.

Doug was born in New York City and is a graduate of Brown University. He lives in Oakland, California with his wife, Dr. Sara Newmann, and their twins.