NEWS

Local angle: Goldsboro

Photo note: To download a photo of Carl Kasell, see below.

By LANITA WITHERS
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Carl Kasell, the popular broadcast personality from National Public Radio, will speak at 5 p.m. March 4 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The free public talk in the Carroll Hall Auditorium will be part of the Reed Sarratt Lecture Series in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

Kasell’s radio career spans more than five decades. He joined NPR in 1975 as a part-time newscaster for "Weekend All Things Considered." He has been with the award-winning news program "Morning Edition" since its inception in 1979, and his morning top-of-the-hour newscasts can be heard on radio stations nationwide.

Kasell also serves as the official judge and scorekeeper for the NPR quiz show "Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!" Winners are rewarded with a custom message on their home answering machine in the broadcaster’s familiar voice.

Kasell, a Goldsboro native and UNC alumnus, worked at a radio station part-time while attending Goldsboro High School. While in college, he worked with Charles Kuralt as a radio announcer at WUNC-FM. He was a morning deejay and newscaster at WGBR-AM in Goldsboro before leaving in 1965 to work as a morning anchor and news director at WAVA in Washington, D.C.

In 1996, Kasell was honored with the Leo C. Lee Friend of Public Radio News Award for lasting commitment to public radio journalism. He also received the Public Radio Regional Organization (PRRO) Award in 1991, for what a member of the selection committee called his "consistently flawless delivery" of newscasts.

The Sarratt series, begun in 1987, honors the late Reed Sarratt, a Charlotte native and 1937 Carolina graduate. Sarratt directed the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association Foundation for many years and later directed the association itself.

Sarratt, the inaugural president of the school’s Journalism Alumni and Friends Association, was named to the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame in 1985. Former Sarratt lecturers include TV journalist David Brinkley, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Jeff MacNelly and founding editor of Ms. Magazine Patricia Carbine.

For more information, contact John Sweeney at (919) 962-4074 or at jsweeney@email.unc.edu.

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(Withers is a senior in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication from Reidsville.)

Photo url: http://www.unc.edu/news/pics/alum/kasell_carl.jpg

Contact: John Sweeney, (919) 962-4074, jsweeney@email.unc.edu