Holly Gauntt in talks to become Denver TV news director. UPDATE: Named News Director at KWGN/KDVR.

[Colorado Media Newsroom]

From The Denver Post:

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Holly Gauntt, VP and news director for ABC affiliate KOMO-TV in Seattle, is in negotiations to become a Denver TV news director. The question is, with how many stations?

Denver currently has three openings: at KUSA where Patti Dennis has moved up, at KDVR-KWGN where Ed Kosowski has moved on, and at KMGH where Jeff Harris departed (along with general manager Byron Grandy). The rumor mill has Gauntt in talks with some or all of these newsrooms.

Denver currently ranks No. 17 on Nielsen’s list of TV households with 1.565 million; Seattle-Tacoma ranks No. 14 with 1.802 million. But part of the appeal of Denver is the powerhouse owners of the local broadcast properties. Tribune now owns Fox31-KWGN, Gannett owns KUSA, Scripps owns KMGH. (Of those Tribune has the most leverage in the industry.)

KDVR-KWGN boss Peter Maroney would only say he is “down to four finalists, two internal candidates, two external” and he hopes to make an announcement in the next 48 hours.

Gauntt’s name has been buzzing around the market in rumors for weeks. She graduated from CU-Boulder in journalism, got her start in the business at KUSA as a writer-researcher and has worked at eight stations “from Denver to Washington, D.C.,” according to her NATAS bio. She covered the bombing of the Murrah building while working in Oklahoma City and the terrorist attacks on 9/11 while working in Washington, D.C. Before her current gig in Seattle, she was news director of WTXF, the Fox-owned station in Philadelphia.

Her career in broadcast journalism spans 28 years. We should know more by the end of the week.


More... (http://blogs.denverpost.com/ostrow/2014/10/15/holly-gauntt-will-fox31s-news-director/20181/)

[Rob]

Holly Gauntt has been named the new News Director at KWGN/KDVR.

[Colorado Media Newsroom]

From The Denver Post:

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Talk about Denver TV roots: Holly Gauntt, the newly installed news director at KDVR-KWGN, just arrived from KOMO Seattle, interned for Channel 9 back in the day, after serving as housesitter and dog walker for her journalism professor at CU, one Ed Sardella. He hired Gauntt for her first paying job in broadcast TV, putting together Sardella's opinion poll four nights a week. (She later shared duties with fellow intern Kim Christiansen.) Patti Dennis was the 5 p.m. producer at the time.

Raised in Littleton, the 1980 Arapahoe High School grad remembers when Arapahoe Road was dirt.

Now, after detours to the Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., TV markets, Gauntt intends to take on the market kingpin as she did in Seattle. Gannett’s KING has been the dominant Seattle station for a decade but under Gauntt KOMO proved a consistent challenger, regularly within a few tenths of a rating point. In Denver, Gannett’s KUSA is an even longer-standing No. 1, and by wider margins, but Gauntt sees vulnerabilities.

She’s still finding her way around the labyrinthine Fox31/Channel 2 building (she’s refreshingly candid about the current unbecoming set). Gauntt intends to “be more inclusive” in her KDVR-KWGN newsroom, tapping into staffers’ strengths, perhaps shuffling some positions. She plans to “give Channel 2 a lot more attention.” She shares the opinion of many viewers that rebranding it as “The Deuce” was a bad idea. Having grown up here, she notes, “that’s an iconic TV station.”

More... (http://blogs.denverpost.com/ostrow/2014/12/15/holly-gauntt/20730/)