Jacob Rice
Jacob Rice Monster Bureau Reporter, MNN Olympia
Jacob Rice didn’t set out to become the Pacific Northwest’s most reliable voice on monster news. He was just a guy with a phone and a Facebook account in the right place at the wrong time.
Rice grew up in Port Gamble, Washington, a small historic town on the west side of Puget Sound known for its Victorian architecture, its timber industry heritage, and what locals will tell you, if you ask the right way, is an unusually active paranormal population. He left for Chicago to study economics at the University of Chicago, with no particular plan to return to the woods and waterways of his childhood.
That changed on a Tuesday evening in Grant Park.
Rice was livestreaming a walk along the lakefront when a disturbance near the tree line drew his attention. What followed — a chaotic, seventeen-minute broadcast that has since accumulated more than four million views — captured what cryptozoologists would later confirm was a Dogman encounter in one of America’s most densely populated urban parks. Rice kept the camera steady. He kept talking. He did not run until he had what he needed.
Monster News Network called the next morning.
“I didn’t know what MNN was,” Rice has said. “I thought it was a prank.”
It wasn’t. The network offered him a field reporter position covering the Pacific Northwest bureau, based in Olympia. Rice took the job, packed two bags, and drove home.
He has been with the Olympia bureau ever since, covering monster incidents across Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and wherever the wire sends him. His reporting has taken him to the shores of Lake Superior during a coast guard encounter with the SS Bannockburn, to a greasy diner outside Alamogordo after a federal agent went dark mid-interview, and to a cabin in the Appalachian Mountains moments before a hellhound collected what it came for.
Rice files from the field more often than not. When he is in the bureau he is already reading the next dispatch.
He signs off every broadcast the same way. It is not a catchphrase.
Jacob Rice is a reporter for Monster News Network based in Olympia, Washington. He covers the Pacific Northwest bureau and contributes field reports across North America.
Jane Grey
Jane Grey Anchor, Monster Bureau / MNN Olympia
Jane Grey has never had trouble asking the difficult question. The problem, she will tell you, is that nobody ever believes the answer.
Grey grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a public school teacher and a city firefighter. She was the kind of kid who read the newspaper front to back before school and argued about it at the dinner table. She earned her Master’s in Journalism from Maryland State University and walked into her first television newsroom the week after graduation, ready to work.
What followed was one of the most decorated careers in broadcast journalism of her generation.
Over nearly two decades at CBS News, Grey built a reputation as one of the sharpest investigative reporters in the business. She covered three presidential elections, two wars, and a financial crisis. She interviewed heads of state, whistleblowers, and survivors. Her long-form investigative work earned her the Global Press Broadcast Journalist of the Year award, one of the most competitive honors in international media, and a standing at CBS that most journalists spend entire careers chasing.
Then she filed the story that changed everything.
Grey had been quietly investigating a pattern of disappearances among homeless individuals and recovering addicts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, a story that local authorities had declined to pursue with any urgency. Working her own sources over eight months, she traced the disappearances to an abandoned industrial complex on the western edge of the city. What she found there, documented on her own camera with no crew, no backup, and no prior warning to her editors, was not what anyone expected.
The subsequent report confirmed the existence of an organized vampire den operating in plain sight of one of America’s largest metropolitan areas. Seventeen missing persons cases were closed. The story ran once.
Then came the controversy.
CBS News stood behind Grey’s reporting but could not stand behind the subject matter. The institutional pressure was immediate and relentless. Colleagues who had respected her for twenty years quietly suggested the footage was manipulated. Editors who had championed her work suddenly needed more verification on a story that had already been verified. The network offered her a graceful exit framed as a sabbatical.
Grey didn’t take the sabbatical. She took the job at MNN.
“I spent twenty years chasing the truth,” she said in her first MNN broadcast. “I wasn’t going to stop because the truth turned out to be inconvenient.”
That was five years ago. Grey now anchors Monster Bureau from the Olympia bureau desk, serving as the institutional voice of MNN’s Pacific Northwest operation while field reporter Jacob Rice works the stories from the ground. She receives his dispatches, contextualizes them for the listener, and occasionally reminds him, on air and off, that she has been in tighter situations than whatever he is currently describing.
Her instincts are impeccable. Her sourcing is meticulous. And she has never, in five years of monster news, filed a story she could not stand behind.
The Global Press award sits on a shelf behind the anchor desk. Next to it is a small glass bottle of holy water. She does not discuss the bottle on air.
Jane Grey is the anchor for Monster Bureau on Monster News Network, based in the Olympia, Washington bureau. She previously served as an investigative correspondent for CBS News.