“I want this show to always have one piece in it where someone listens to it and says, ‘You know what I heard on the radio today?’ and talks about it at the dinner table,” Madeleine Brand says in a Los Angeles Times feature on the Sept. 20 debut of her new morning show for KPCC in Pasadena. “Intellectually stimulated and delighted at the same time,” she says. “My goal is for it not to be reheated broccoli.” The Madeleine Brand Show airs weekday mornings at 9 a.m. — the same timeslot as Day to Day, the NPR newsmagazine that Brand cohosted until its cancellation last year. “The point of view is now unapologetically a Southern California point of view,” KPCC Program Director Craig Curtis tells the Times.
Meanwhile, a pubradio outlet on the opposite coast just launched two new weekly programs. Public Radio Delmarva, which is competing against two distant pubradio stations that recently added stations on Maryland’s Eastern shore, today debuted a show helmed by Marc Steiner, founder and former host of Baltimore’s WYPR, On Delmarva. Last weekend the saucy Saturday broadcast 2 Boomer Babes, which pubradio “program doctor” Jim Russell had a hand in developing, began its run. 2 Boomer Babes previously aired on a commercial station.