Weekends give us all the opportunity to recharge, refresh and relax after a busy week. It’s no different in the world of public radio, and recently we’ve made some changes to refresh our weekend schedule to better serve you and your weekend routine. Highlights include an extra hour of Weekend Edition on both Saturday and Sunday mornings, as well as additional broadcasts of Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, and new shows like Hidden Brain, The Splendid Table, Reveal and Freakonomics. We’re excited to bring these new programs to our air, joining recent additions like the BBC Newshour to better serve you with the news and information content you’re looking for. At the same time, we’re also strengthening the lineup of KVPR Classical, with the addition of Sunday Baroque to our HD-2 service in the Fresno/Clovis area on FM 89.3 HD-2 and worldwide on the KVPR App, KVPR.org and connected devices.
While we’re welcoming new programs to our air, we’re also welcoming two talented journalists who both grew up in the San Joaquin Valley to the KVPR news department, Esther Quintanilla and Joshua Yeager. Joshua will be in a new position as a Report For America Corps reporter based in Bakersfield, covering health and environmental issues for us in Kern County. In recent years, Joshua has been reporting on similar issues in Visalia for the Times-Delta. Esther will be based in Fresno County and will focus on a beat covering diverse communities. She grew up in Bakersfield, got her undergraduate degree from UC Merced and graduate degree from USC, and will be contributing to our work with the Central Valley News Collaborative. Esther’s role had previously been filled by reporter Madi Bolanos, who in June was hired as the new statewide host of KQED’s The California Report. While we’re sad to see Madi leave KVPR’s newsroom, we’re excited to have her continue her career in public media and know that we’ll continue to hear her on KVPR weekday mornings.
In the last issue of KVPR Magazine, we featured a cover story about the launch of our new podcast The Other California. Since that issue went to print, our team has completed the project, bringing listeners 11 episodes of stories and conversations about our valley and the people who call it home. If you haven’t already done so, I strongly encourage you to give it a listen, as it’s one of the finest and most thoughtful projects KVPR has ever produced. Throughout the podcast, host, executive producer and KVPR News Director Alice Danieldiscovers the rich human stories that fill the San Joaquin Valley’s small towns, from Taft to Huron, Woodlake, Chowchilla and beyond. I guarantee even people who have lived in the valley their whole lives will learn something new, and walk away with a different understanding of what makes our region and the people who live here special. You can listen to The Other California wherever you get your podcasts or find it online at: KVPR.org/TOC
Sadly, The Other California will be Alice Daniel's last major project for KVPR. Alice will be leaving the station later this summer and moving with her family to Ireland for the next year, where her husband has a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Limerick, and where one of her sons will also go to university. We’re excited for Alice and her family for this new chapter, and we are currently working to recruit our next news director. With this transition underway, Valley Edition will go on hiatus this summer. We’re going to take this opportunity to reboot and retool our strategies for delivering our award-winning local news content on both broadcast and digital platforms. We want to build on the success of our recent projects like Escape From Mammoth Pool and The Other California, and find new ways to share our local daily news, in-depth reports and insightful interviews with current and future listeners. Despite this change, you’ll continue to hear our award-winning local reporting within KVPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered and on KVPR.org over the summer and beyond.
