20Q: Angie Coiro

The hard work and fun of going off script

Why are you a journalist?

Because theater didn’t work out. Really, that’s how I got into it. I was a college dropout, I took one class in journalism. One. I was a theater person, and I was gonna have my Tony by the time I was 31 years old. But I moved away to where there was no theater and I did radio instead. And I ended up on news broadcasts and it sorta went from there.

Worst piece of advice you’ve ever gotten?

I was told once that I did not have a voice for public radio. That was before I spent 15 years at KQED, on the air and on TV. A public radio person told me that. She just shook her head and said “you really don’t have a voice for this.” (Laughs) I’m sure she meant well.

What’s a radio program you couldn’t live without?

I won’t say my own, because that’s rude. I would say, as bland an answer as it is, Morning Edition or All Things Considered because they’re so all-encompassing.

If you could interview anyone with a lie-detector, who would you choose?

I would really like to sit down with Bill Clinton and get answers to some of the things that were left as question marks in his time in the White House and after. Especially how he feels about some of the things that went down back then. The obvious one is Monica Lewinsky, not what they did (I don’t care about the salacious stuff), but his thought process in how he handled that— how he could’ve thought his really lame answers would put a curtain between him and it. What is interesting about that to me is that his political calculus mechanism was really strong, or he wouldn’t have got where he did, but for some reason that really failed him. I would ask him about those times where he didn’t quite manage to be Bill Clinton.

Is is true JD Vance is the only guest who cancelled on the day of the show?

No, he wasn’t. A very prominent woman writer, whose credentials as a journalist were impeccable, she’s done really important writing (I won’t mention her name because I think it would demean her whole work), she left me live and without a guest on KQED. And I had to figure out an hour of live radio that we hadn’t planned. I never heard why she didn’t show up.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when I say “podcast?”

Hard work. So much hard work. Some of them have risen to a level of visibility that they may be getting paid part of what they put into it, heart and soul. Nothing ever fully pays for all that work. And I think of all the people who aren’t getting paid and they’re just doing it from their gut. God bless ’em. Hard work.

Most challenging interview?

I had a young woman who wrote a book that had something to do with nature and wilderness, and we were just about to go live and she looked at me, she was terror-stricken, and she goes, “Are we live?!” She hadn’t been set up well by her publicist, the poor thing was practically birthing kittens. And what could we do? There was one point where I asked her to read (I thought that if she could read a small amount that she had written, she could get her feet underneath her) and she opened her book, and she looked at me, and she picked up a glass of water and just started drinking the water. Here we are on live radio with a massive audience, and this is so not working. So she finished up the interview and they went to national, and I turn around and she was gone. She ran out of that studio. That was probably the hardest one I ever had to do because I was so busy feeling sorry for her. You know, the people who argue back— I just have fun with that. That’s jousting. That’s fun stuff. And you have enough people that do that that it’s not particularly unusual. She was unusual.

How do you get a guest to go off-script?

One thing I’m very proud of is how I do this. When I have a guest scheduled, I try to to research all their appearances immediately prior. Authors (this is especially true of authors) who are on a national tour understandably fall into telling the same stories again and again, which used to be fine before you had podcasting and everything was recorded. Nowadays, an audience shows up and they’ve already heard it all, they don’t want to hear it again. So I don’t ask them anything that would lead into that story again. If they seem to be going there, I’ll just say “you know what, let’s take a side street from that. What did you think when blahblahblah?” and I’ll steer them away from it. Or you can preempt it by saying, “I know when you talked to Terry Gross on Fresh Air you told her this story. I wonder how that went down with your partner at the time?”

Should journalists stay on X.com? [Editor’s note: When, during the 2024 presidential campaign and aftermath, it became obvious the owner of X had a vested interested in the outcome, Angie and many other news professionals left the platform. Her answer below reflects a previous belief that X was useful to journalists.]

I’m a journalist who left X.com and went back. And I’m happy that I did, but—God, I hate to even say this out loud—I need X. I’m booking guests there. When you have a following of 7000 some, and then when you go over to Bluesky or whatever and you’ve got five people following you and you approach a guest, well they’re gonna look at you and see that you have five followers and won’t care. So eventually, for strictly professional reasons, I had to go back to X.

I’m waiting to see what finally emerges as the champion of alternatives, but it’s just not there now. Mastodon probably has its heart in exactly the right place but a lot of people hear about “instances” and they’re like, “What the hell is an instance?” They don’t understand the language. And then you have everything else— Bluesky and all the others are roughly equivalent.

I actually think there’s a lot that happens on X that is, in a way, independent of Musk. I’m willing to use that platform for what I consider to be the anti-X. I’m constantly bashing Elon Musk on there, I’m constantly bashing the platform. But I’m there, so I’m a hypocrite. The more you think about the morality, the harder it gets. You can shove that under pick-your-battles, I guess it’s a pick-your-battles thing.

What do you do to stay sane?

Oh, I love to sleep. I love to sleep. I don’t think I can tell you how much I love to sleep. And I have potted plants. I don’t have a garden because the deer eat everything up here, but I have decks that are safe from deer and I can lost up there for hours and hours and hours. And I’m not even good at it (I have a kill rate of at least 25 percent) but it’s peace. And I don’t bring my phone out there.

One thing you wish you could change about the industry?

Easy, I wish we could take the damn commercial money out of the industry. I wish we could go back to the days where it was considered a public service. Even the networks didn’t worry about ratings, they didn’t worry about how many eyeballs they gathered, they worried about what it would look like in their FCC “good guy” file. “Did we serve the public this quarter?,” that’s gone! I think you have the individual journalists who care a lot. Do their bosses really care? Depends how far up the line you go. And the further you get up the line, the less it has to do with news and journalism.

Worst on-air flub?

This was back when I was a traffic reporter and I was on eight stations at once. There was one station that required you use a different name because they wanted to appear as though they had all their own staff, exclusive staff, but they didn’t want to pay for it. So we all used different names on that station and used our real names on the other stations. So I was on air where I was Angie Coiro on Magic 61 and I finished up the cast and I said, “I’m Liz Chesky KGO 24-hour traffic.” Wrong station, wrong name. And the DJ, bless his heart, he just bursts out laughing. He goes, “you’re who?” That was my second worst screw-up. The first was an accidental f-bomb.

Who’s a journalist we should listen to?

It’s a little bit biased because it’s the same station I’m developing programs with, but I swear that’s not why I’m saying it. There’s a woman named Rose Aguilar, and she has been doing a show called Your Call on KALW radio. She’s doing a morning show that is so important— the topics that she takes on, the underrepresented people that she talks to. She doesn’t mince words about things being right or wrong. When she talks about the homeless sweeps, she’ll always talk about the people involved. Yeah, she’ll talk about the politics, but she’ll never let it be forgotten that there are people who are being told they have to get off the street with no where else to go. She just isn’t afraid to sound biased just by virtue of speaking the facts. She says what is.

Best way for young journalists to survive and grow?

(Laughs) Be independently rich.

My inclination is to say to listen to as many points of view as you can, but I don’t know how valid that is anymore since some outlets are just married to lying. Maybe that’s the answer— develop a radar, as fast as you can, for bullshit. How much that’s gonna sell within the industry, I don’t know. But how it’s gonna serve you? I think it will serve you to be a good journalist.

Is there such as thing as objective reporting?

I don’t know. If I can twist this a little bit, there is such a thing as honest, fair reporting. I don’t know if you can call that objective. There are always gonna be multiple POVs on a story, but there is honestly and there is fairness. I think those exist.

What’s the biggest issue in your hometown right now?

It’s housing. It’s the battle over zoning, and building low-income housing, and people getting mad about city infill. I live in San Carlos, CA.

What’s the most exciting thing happening in journalism right now?

This is in the story I’m working on! This whole rise of nonprofit journalism. I mean, look at ProPublica, look at NPR taking over Gothamist. This might be the salvation of the whole pie of journalism. What we talked about earlier— getting the money out of it! I don’t mean to say that nonprofit is utterly untainted by money, of course it’s not, but it has a different set of ambitions and it answers to different people than commercial broadcasting or print does. Yeah, I’m optimistic about that.

Coffee order?

Nothing fancy, just half-caff with oat milk. I make a ton of it here at the house. Hot cups in the morning, iced coffee in the afternoon.

Do you put on a “radio voice?”

I really try not to, and I can tell when other people are doing it. Because I studied voice-over and I did voice-over for a long time, and the thing they really beat you over the head with was, “do not listen to your own voice.” And you can always tell when people are doing that because they start putting a voice on. I did have someone tell me once, “oh I can tell your radio voice,” and I thought, “You didn’t mean to insult me, but you insulted me,” (laughs). I probably did do it more when I was younger, but once I started working on my own shows— you can only hide yourself for so long. So once I had my name on the show, it had to be me. I had no choice.

What’s next for you?

I have two shows in the works. One of them is actually debuting, it’s a done deal. It’s an author interview show which kinda riffs off the live interviews that I do. And that’s gonna debut in the next two weeks. The other show that I’m putting together is hush-hush. As far as we can tell, there is not a show that exists like this. We have looked everywhere— we looked at Deutsche Welle, we looked at the BBC, we looked all through everywhere and we can’t find a show like this. And I’m sorry to be a tease, but that’s all I can say about it. But we got big hopes for that one to go national.