By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Marcus Vanderberg on FishbowlLA, August 2012
In late August 2012, KPCC announced a substantial weekday-schedule shuffle effective September 10. The Brand & Martínez show — co-hosted by Madeleine Brand and A Martínez — was expanded from one hour to two, taking the 9-to-11 a.m. mid-morning slot. AirTalk with Larry Mantle shifted to 11 a.m.-1 p.m. The BBC Newshour and PRI’s The World picked up the early-afternoon hours. Patt Morrison’s daily program, which had been a fixture on the station, was effectively cancelled — though Russ Stanton, VP for content, told staff Morrison was “shifting into a new role” that would draw on her “unique experience and style.”
Then
Patt Morrison had been one of KPCC’s most visible hosts for years prior to the August 2012 shuffle. Her broader profile in LA media — also including LA Times columnist work and Emmy-winning television hosting — made the dropping of her daily KPCC program a substantive public-radio story.
The Brand & Martínez expansion was strategically structured. KPCC had been investing in the show as a vehicle for reaching younger and more demographically diverse listeners. A Martínez had joined as co-host in late 2011 from KCRW, where he had hosted Madeleine Brand (the predecessor program). Russ Stanton’s stated rationale — picked up in subsequent KPCC president Bill Davis statements — was that Latino listenership had doubled since the Martínez hire.
The schedule shuffle was the kind of programming move that public-radio stations periodically execute and that produces sustained listener-reaction-comments cycles. Stanton himself ended up chiming into the SCPR website comment thread to reassure listeners that Morrison wasn’t leaving and that her “signature reports” would continue under the new structure.
The original FishbowlLA framing — by then-FBLA contributor Marcus Vanderberg — was a straightforward read of the SCPR announcement: the schedule, the host moves, and the listener-reaction comments.
Now
The 2012 KPCC schedule shuffle did not hold in its launched form. Madeleine Brand left KPCC in October 2012 — within weeks of the expanded program’s debut — for what the station described as a “lucrative TV production deal.” The show was rebranded to Take Two with Martínez and Alex Cohen. A Martínez subsequently moved to NPR’s Morning Edition as one of the hosts in 2021, where he continues to anchor the program’s national broadcast.
Patt Morrison continued at KPCC in a reduced-role capacity for years, eventually moving toward more print-and-essay-based work and away from her daily-broadcast cadence. Her LA Times column work has continued across the interval.
Russ Stanton, who oversaw the 2012 shuffle as VP for content, had earlier been editor of the LA Times until 2011. His KPCC tenure overlapped with the station’s growth into the LA region’s lead public-radio newsroom; he subsequently left for other media roles.
KPCC merged with LAist in 2018-2020, producing the current KPCC-LAist editorial structure. AirTalk with Larry Mantle has continued across the entire interval and is now one of the longest-running call-in shows in American public radio. The 2012 schedule shuffle reads now as one of the documented moments when the station was attempting a substantial demographic-broadening repositioning that the subsequent Madeleine Brand exit only partially disrupted — the broader Brand & Martínez framework persisted in modified form for years afterward.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.