By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, October 2012
On October 2, 2012, KPCC held a “Millennials mixer” open house at its Pasadena headquarters. Among the small-group attendees was LA journalist Luis Gomez, who happened to encounter station president and CEO Bill Davis emerging from his office. Davis fielded questions on the spot — including confirming that Madeleine Brand had left KPCC for a “lucrative TV production deal” and that the Martínez–Cohen-rebranded morning program was the path forward. The original FishbowlLA framing captured the on-the-fly press encounter and the station-leadership-disclosure dynamic it produced.
Then
Bill Davis had been KPCC’s president and CEO since 2000 — a long-tenure run that, by 2012, made him one of the senior figures in U.S. public-radio station management. The October open house was structured as an audience-engagement event aimed at the under-35 listener demographic the station had been working to expand into.
The on-the-fly Q&A produced several disclosures of substantive station-history interest. Davis told Gomez and the others that Madeleine Brand had left for a TV deal (the speculation that followed centered on Current TV, NBC LA, and Al Gore-backed Ora.tv as the likely destinations). He noted that KPCC’s Latino listenership had doubled since A Martínez was hired. He framed the new Martínez-Alex Cohen morning show as the deliberate-choice path forward, after a substantial internal-and-external candidate-search process.
The recursive media-coverage element — a public-radio station president doing impromptu Q&A in his office hallway, then having those answers picked up the same week as substantive disclosure — was characteristically FBLA. The original framing by Richard Horgan picked up the institutional-disclosure-in-an-informal-setting dynamic.
Now
Madeleine Brand returned to KPCC in 2013 — the TV production deal she had left for did not produce a sustained on-camera role, and the station ended up bringing her back as host of her own afternoon show. Press Play with Madeleine Brand ran on KPCC for years through the post-2013 schedule cycles; Brand has continued as one of the recurring on-air hosts in the LA-region public-radio ecosystem.
A Martínez moved to NPR’s Morning Edition as one of the program’s national hosts in 2021. His transition from the KPCC mid-morning slot to the national-broadcast morning-program slot was one of the more visible recent public-radio host transitions — built on the kind of demographic-broadening case Davis had made in the October 2012 hallway Q&A.
Alex Cohen continued at KPCC across the years and has remained one of the durable bylines in the LA-region public-radio newsroom. Bill Davis stepped down as KPCC president in 2020 after a 20-year tenure; his successors have continued through the post-2020 KPCC-LAist integration.
Luis Gomez has continued in LA-area journalism. The recursive-press-encounter moment the 2012 piece captured — public-radio station president, impromptu open-house Q&A, FBLA pickup — has aged into one of the small documented moments of how LA-media institutional disclosure worked in the early-2010s era when these kinds of in-person community events were still substantial parts of public-radio station programming.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.