Public radio station WNYC in New York and PRI (Public Radio International) are launching The Takeaway, a new morning news program hosted live by NPR and NBC Dateline journalist John Hockenberry and former CNN/ABC journalist and Court TV host Adaora Udoji, next Monday April 28, 6am-7 am on AM, 8 am to 9 am on FM. The program, which will be on radio, online and on demand podcast, is a collaboration with the BCC, WGBH in Boston, and the New York Times.
And there may be live performances, as well. Author interviews? Readings? Book news? Literary commentary? Let’s hope so. WYNC produces Selected Shorts, the short story reading series, and collaborates with PRI on Studio 360, novelist Kurt Anderson’s cultural news and views program (his 2003 interviews with Susan Sontag, Congolese novelist Emmanuel Dongala and NBCC fiction finalist Aleksandar Hemon on how artists portray war, broadcast shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq, here). And, of course, WNYC has Leonard Lopate. WNYC’s listeners get a lot of their book news on the radio, and they read books (60 percent have bought twelve or more books within the past year, a figure worth boasting about these days).