Meet Josh Kruger
Based in Philadelphia, Josh uses his unique combination of lived experience with homelessness, addiction, HIV, poverty, and trauma together with over a decade of professional experience in media, politics, and government for compelling storytelling and unparalleled insight into the news.
He has won multiple awards for his commentary and news reporting, including from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association, and the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. His writing has spurred government into action and shed light on communities and issues sometimes overlooked by traditional media.
He is a cat person and hates driving in cars, preferring to bicycle or ride trains.
Josh’s Full Professional Biography
Described as a “radical homosexual activist” and an “effeminate man-child” by critics, Josh Kruger is a writer and communications expert known for weaving his unique lived experience with homelessness, HIV, Philadelphia’s “street economy,” trauma, and poverty throughout his commentary and writing.
He spent five years in local government as a City Hall content director, spokesperson, and communications director before returning to journalism in 2021. He uses his expert knowledge of local government and politics to bring unparalleled insight to the news and special consulting projects.
His work has appeared in alt-weeklies, daily newspapers, numerous digital publications, and local and national magazines. Fellow journalists, publishers, readers, and editors have repeatedly recognized Josh’s writing as exceptional, with the Society of Professional Journalists calling his work “mesmerizing. Not just an unusual point of view, but excellent writing, too.”
In 2014 and 2015, Josh won the Society of Professional Journalists’ First Place Award for newspaper commentary in Pennsylvania, the first and only writer in history to win that award multiple times in successive years. In 2015, the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association awarded him the Edith Hughes Emerging Journalist Award, which encourages young journalists to continue along in their careers.
Josh’s writing runs the gamut from long-form journalism providing incisive analysis of high profile politicians to advocacy- and solutions-based commentary to humorous personal reflections to daily news reporting for one of the largest metro areas and media markets in the United States. Along with his journalism, Josh has experience advancing progressive causes and campaigns, like the successful Philadelphia Beverage Tax, known colloquially as the “soda tax,” campaign which brought about the nation’s first-ever tax on soda in a major city to fund public and early education. He’s also supported organizations focusing on public education, poverty, homelessness, criminal justice reform, drug legalization, and racial and class equity.
A member of the LGBTQ community, he resides in the Point Breeze neighborhood of Philadelphia. Josh is a proponent of the singular they, the Oxford comma, and pre-Elon Twitter. He is a militant bicyclist, Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian and parishioner at St. Mark’s Church on Locust Street, and lives with his best friend, his senior cat with one tooth named Mason.