Adriene Hill To Head California Regional Newsroom

Adriene Hill, longtime and pioneering public radio journalist, has been hired to lead the California Regional Newsroom, a public radio collaboration among KQED, KPBS, CapRadio, KPCC/LAist, KCRW, along with NPR as the statewide newsroom's national partner. Hill will be based in Los Angeles and serve as the managing editor of the regional newsroom.

The hire represents a critical moment for the collaborative as it shifts from its startup mode, working to better coordinate statewide coverage and bolster investigative journalism in California, to a more sustainable and ongoing stage providing essential content sharing and partnerships between some of the state's largest news operations.

Adriene Hill

Hill is a natural fit for the job having served as the interim managing editor of the collaborative for the past six months. She also served in a coordinating role as the senior editor of the California Dream project, a collaboration made up of four of the anchor stations of this new effort.

"It's been an amazing opportunity to work with talented journalists across California and to share stories that reflect the immense diversity of the state," says Hill. "Working together, our public media organizations can achieve so much more than they could on their own. This regional collaboration gives us the opportunity to combine our resources, pursue innovation and ultimately discover better ways to serve our audiences."

The California Regional Newsroom is one of several such collaborations in the country, along with The Texas Newsroom, the Midwest Newsroom and the Gulf Coast Newsroom. Aside from regional collaboration, there are also topic teams with focused reporting on education, politics, health policy, energy/environment and more. So far, one hundred stations are involved with one or more topic teams.

Previously, Hill was the managing editor of KPCC/LAist, and also served as a correspondent and fill-in host for the public radio business program Marketplace. Hill will work out of Los Angeles, but will be leading daily collaboration and coordination between news outlets across California, including public media affiliates in Fresno, Chico, San Luis Obispo and beyond.