NewsDepth: Meet the Hosts!

Meet NewsDepth Host Michelle Kanu!

Michelle Kanu is the newest co-host of NewsDepth. For the past year, she has covered education stories as a reporter for 90.3 WCPN, and occasionally helps produce the station’s public affairs show, the Sound of Ideas. You may also remember her from NewsDepth! Michelle was the reporter for a story about technology at Beachwood Middle School that appeared on NewsDepth in April, 2011.

Michelle started out in journalism in eleventh grade writing news and features stories for the school newspaper. Once in college, she continued writing a column for the Daily Californian at the University of California Berkeley.

In 2004, Michelle was selected to be a contributor for GeNEXT, a Newsweek Magazine section that featured student perspectives of the presidential elections. After college, Michelle detoured from journalism to work with kids by leading an after school program and helping high school students get into college. That inspired her to return to school, to Stanford University where she received a master’s degree in Education Policy in 2008.

In 2009, Michelle moved to Cleveland with her husband and she joined the ideastream team a year later.  When she’s not covering the news, Michelle loves cooking, exercising and volunteering.

Meet NewsDepth Host Rick Jackson!

Rick Jackson has been the host of NewsDepth for several years. He works at WVIZ/PBS ideastream in Cleveland, where he is a producer, a reporter, and a host for other television and radio programs there as well as well as NewsDepth.

Rick grew up in Pittsburgh, but his maternal grandparents and much of their family had earlier settled in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, and some of them are still there today. As a child, Rick would often visit Cleveland, Columbus, and Youngstown, to see his relatives.

Rick graduated from a school in Pennsylvania that often played sports opponents in Ohio, but he never imagined that one day Ohio would be his home. He eventually graduated from Bethany College, just seven miles across the state line, in West Virginia, with a Communications and Journalism Degree.

He has been a professional news broadcaster for 30 years, working at television stations in Wheeling, West Virginia; Memphis, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and in Cleveland. While based in New York, Rick was the anchor of an international news program seen in more than 40 foreign countries, and in 48 of the United States.

He has also worked on the air for radio stations in four cities around the country, including Cleveland. But he’s been here the most, being heard or seen on the air in Ohio for more than 22 years!

He also says he likes to travel, and has produced news stories in each of Ohio’s 10 most populous cities. Can you name them?

Plus, he has visited 55 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Do you think yours might have been one of them?

Among the many thousands of stories he has reported, Rick especially is proud of the eleven times that he has interviewed a President of the United States, including Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton; and for interviewing Space Station and Shuttle Veteran Shannon Lucid, and Dr. Jay Apt; while they orbited the earth on STS-79 (Space Shuttle Atlantis).

Rick also has twice covered National Political conventions – in New Orleans with the Republican Party in 1988, and in Chicago with the Democrats in 1996. But he says the most fun stories have been the opportunity to skydive with the US Army’s Golden Knights many years ago in North Carolina, and to pilot an F-16E with the USAF Thunderbirds when they were in Cleveland in 2000.