Meet the Hosts!
Meet Host Rick Jackson!
For the fourth year, Rick Jackson is the Host of NewsDepth. He works at WVIZ/PBS in Cleveland, where NewsDepth is produced each week, and hosts other television and radio programs there as well.
Rick grew up in Pittsburgh, but his maternal grandparents and much of their family had earlier settled in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley, and some of them are still there today. As a child, Rick would often visit Cleveland, Columbus, and Youngstown, to see his relatives.
Rick graduated from a school in Pennsylvania that often played sports opponents in Ohio, but he never imagined that one day Ohio would be his home. He eventually graduated from Bethany College, just seven miles across the state line, in West Virginia, with a Communications and Journalism Degree.
He has been a professional news broadcaster for 30 years, working at television stations in Wheeling, West Virginia; Memphis, Tennessee; Charlotte, North Carolina; New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and in Cleveland. While based in New York, Rick was the anchor of an international news program seen in more than 40 foreign countries, and in 48 of the United States.
He has also worked on the air for radio stations in four cities around the country, including Cleveland. But he’s been here the most, being heard or seen on the air in Ohio for more than 22 years!
He also says he likes to travel, and has produced news stories in each of Ohio’s 10 most populous cities. Can you name them?
Plus, he has visited 55 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Do you think yours might have been one of them?
Among the many thousands of stories he has reported, Rick especially is proud of the eleven times that he has interviewed a President of the United States, including Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton; and for interviewing Space Station and Shuttle Veteran Shannon Lucid, and Dr. Jay Apt; while they orbited the earth on STS-79 (Space Shuttle Atlantis).
Rick also has twice covered National Political conventions – in New Orleans with the Republican Party in 1988, and in Chicago with the Democrats in 1996. But he says the most fun stories have been the opportunity to skydive with the US Army’s Golden Knights many years ago in North Carolina, and to pilot an F-16E with the USAF Thunderbirds when they were in Cleveland in 2000.
Meet Host Dan Moulthrop!
Dan Moulthrop joined News Depth in 2007. He also is the host of The Sound of Ideas, which airs in Greater Cleveland weekday mornings at nine on 90.3 FM, WCPN, and you can occasionally catch him helping out on the WVIZ/PBS news show ideas. Dan began working in journalism in 2003, as a freelance reporter in California.
One of his first big projects was a book about teachers in public schools. The book is called Teachers Have it Easy. He actually knows teachers don’t have it very easy at all, but the title sure got people talking. Dan knows a lot about what it’s like to teach because he used to be a high school English teacher. He did that for four years in San Lorenzo, California, but his first teaching job was in a county jail in San Francisco.
Dan covers a lot of different topics as a reporter and host, but he loves politics best of all. Election night is kind of like his Super Bowl. But he likes sports, too, and lots of other stuff, especially his two kids. Dan and his wife and family live in Shaker Heights, Ohio, just east of Cleveland.
Contact Us!
NewsDepth | WVIZ/PBS ideastream®
Idea Center™ at PlayhouseSquare | 1375 Euclid Avenue | Cleveland, OH 44115
newsdepth@wviz.org | 216-916-6352
NewsDepth is a production of WVIZ/PBS ideastream and Kent State University School of Journalism and Mass Communications. NewsDepth is made possible in part by a grant from the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation, with support also provided by Alcoa Foundation.
