KCBS(AM/FM) Director of News and Programming Ed Cavagnaro says he will retire in early April.
“Thirty-seven years after I first arrived at KCBS as a foot-in-the-door promotion assistant, I’ve been lucky to work at KCBS for so long, and it’s been an honor to be the news and program director at such a great radio station working with so many talented people,” said Cavagnaro.
In addition to his management duties, Cavagnaro co-hosts “KCBS In Depth,” a weekly half hour news interview program.
Cavagnaro is a San Francisco native who graduated with honors from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974 with a major in journalism and history. He received his master’s in 1975 from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and then worked for the Medill News Service in Washington as a capital correspondent for radio stations in Omaha, Salt Lake City and Springfield, Mo.
He then returned to the Bay Area and worked for a year as an aide to a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, prior to joining KCBS Radio as a promotion assistant in 1977. Six months later, he moved to the newsroom as an editor, and worked as assistant managing editor, managing editor and assistant director of news and programming before being named KCBS director of news and programming in 1988.
In 1990, Cavagnaro supervised the transition from a mostly-news station to all-news station, now heard on both 740 AM and 106.9 FM. For the last two years, KCBS has been the number one rated station in the Bay Area, the fourth largest radio market in the country, according to a release.
“Personally, I’ll greatly miss working with Ed,” said Senior VP and San Francisco Market Manager Doug Harvill. “He’s truly an inspirational leader and one of the best news people on the planet.”
Cavagnaro also serves as chairman of the San Francisco Bay Counties Local Emergency Communications Committee. In 2014, he was elected to the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Barbara.
KCBS(AM/FM) is owned and operated by CBS Radio, which also owns and operates KLLC(FM), KITS(FM) and KMVQ(FM) in San Francisco.
