Kathy Ritchie has nearly 20 years of experience reporting and writing stories for national and local news organizations, including asap, AP’s digital storytelling platform, CHILD magazine and Arizona Highways.

Ritchie joined KJZZ in 2014 as a general assignment reporter, covering breaking and spot news. She began focusing on aging issues in 2017 when she produced a two-part series about aging and intimacy. She was later asked to oversee the 10-part series “The State of Aging in the Valley.” At the time, it was one of the largest newsroom collaborations and culminated in a sit-down interview with Dr. Pauline Boss, author of “Loving Someone Who Has Dementia.”

Since then, she has reported on the many challenges facing LGBT elders; oral health care in long-term care facilities; senior homelessness; women in poverty; ambiguous loss and grief; grandfamilies (grandparents raising grandchildren); and what it means to age in our society. In 2019, Ritchie produced a four-part podcast called the Recovering Caregiver, which explored life after dementia. The final episode was nominated for an Edward R. Murrow Award.

More recently, Ritchie's work has focused on the devastating impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on older adults and people with disabilities.

Over the years, her work on aging has aired on NPR's Here & Now.

Ritchie got her start in television at ABC News and later at FOX News in New York City. She earned her master’s degree from New York University in 2001 and her undergraduate degree from Arizona State University in 1999.