Joe Tarr’s dad was an engineer and his older brother is an engineer. Entering college, Joe had planned to be an engineer too. That is, until he joined the student newspaper at Pennsylvania State University.
“I just got like totally sucked into that world, stopped going to my engineering classes, failed all of them,” Joe said.
He never looked back.
“I was just more interested in people and stories, and that’s kind of where it took off from there,” he said.
And it did take off — Joe has worked for eight other news outlets across the world, including for The Cambodia Daily and the Anchorage Press — during a journalism career that has spanned nearly four decades.
Joe started working for Wisconsin Public Radio in 2020 as a producer on the “Morning Show.” He has used some of his global experience to educate Wisconsin listeners on important issues, including a segment he produced about a dementia village in the Netherlands.
“Having traveled a little bit and been abroad, I just find that there’s a lot of commonalities between people and cultures,” Joe said. “There’s a lot of similar stories and problems that face different cultures and I just think it’s interesting to connect those people.”
As a producer for “Wisconsin Today,” Joe comes up with story ideas and finds guests to be on the show. He also reports his own stories, including a 2024 story he did about a liberal gun club in Wisconsin.
When it comes to radio, he enjoys bringing listeners to the scene.
“You can put people right there, and they can hear something happening and that’s just really amazing,” he said.
Joe lives in Madison. He enjoys going to concerts, listening to music, cooking and reading in his free time.
– Evan Casey, Southeastern Wisconsin Reporter
