Janet Saidi
Producer | Assistant Professor | Interim News DirectorJanet Saidi is KBIA’s long-form audio producer and serves on the Missouri School of Journalism's faculty and graduate faculty. Janet’s many and varied media projects are about building community through audio. She has written and produced pieces for NPR, PBS, the BBC, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times, and she spent seven years leading KBIA's award-winning news team. Her most recent projects include KBIA's podcast Cover Story with Stephanie Shonekan; she hosted KBIA’s live, national-award-winning talk show The Check-In; and she has co-created two award-winning, collaboratively-produced series combining oral history with audio journalism, You Don’t Say and Missouri on Mic. In 2014 and 2016, Janet co-produced two journalism-on-the-stage theater productions with playwright Michelle Tyrene Johnson: Justice in the Embers, with Kansas City’s Living Room Theatre, and The Green Duck Lounge with MU Theatre. Janet began her public-media work at KPBS in San Diego, on a live, nightly talk show called The Lounge. While in California, Janet helped produce the national PBS series “Remaking American Medicine” about healthcare in America, and worked as an editor at the Gay & Lesbian Times and Uptown Newsmagazine. As vice president for news at Kansas City Public Television, Janet led a team of multiplatform journalists to launch KCPT’s digital magazine FlatlandKC, and co-produced the Beyond Belief interfaith journalism project for AIR’s Localore “Finding America” series. Janet lived for several years in England, where she earned her master’s in Literature from University College, London. Her Substack newsletter and podcast is the Austen Connection. Ask her anything you want about Jane!
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On this final episode of the season, Stephanie Shonekan brought in a special guest: her daughter, Ojurere Shonekan. Together, they unpack “Emotion,” a song by the Bee Gees released in 1994. Destiny’s Child covered it in 2001. The song is a vulnerable confession that the loss of a relationship is taking a serious emotional toll. As Stephanie and Ojurere discuss the song and its reinterpretation from disco to R&B, they take some time to reflect on their own shared memories of loss. -
Here's a roundup of headlines from across the region.
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Stephanie Shonekan sat down with her sister dean, Kimberly Griffin, to talk about “Lately,” a classic breakup song that Stevie Wonder released in 1980. The song itself is a crushing glimpse into a relationship that’s slowly becoming one-sided. And when Jodeci covered the song in 1993, the group members infused it with their own range of emotion (because there’s lots of it to go around during a breakup, even the one-sided kind). In this episode, Stephanie and Kimberly break down the artists’ different approaches to “Lately” and reminisce over the era of ‘90s boy groups.
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Ask any beekeeper about the sound of bees working, and they’ll tell you: It’s a gripping sound - the sound of hard work, of production, of interconnection. This episode of Canned Peaches is taking us to the beehives at three Missouri farms - one small farm and producer in central Missouri, another in Spanish Lake in St. Louis County, where Black and BIPOC beekeepers and producers find meditation and connection through audio and bees. And we’ll road-trip to a southwest Missouri farm and research center where veterans are beekeeping for resilience and community. And of course for honey. We’re going out to explore honey, and the world of sound involved in producing it. -
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On this episode, Tom Flynn joins host Stephanie Shonekan to talk about “You Can’t Hurry Love,” an original song by The Supremes that Phil Collins covered in 1982. Though the songs were released a couple decades apart, the message is timeless – and, perhaps a bit frustrating: love takes time. Tom and Stephanie discuss their memories of youth, wanting love and how the song can stand as a light-hearted reminder to hold on.
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Mushrooms have captured people’s attention for centuries. They pop up in ancient Chinese art, Celtic fairy tales and today’s Indigenous medicine. And over the last few years, mushrooms have rapidly increased in popularity. We’re going foraging for mushrooms with Missouri’s state botanist, we’re making mushroom hash with a chef who’s turned his fungi passions into a mushroom-production business, and we’re talking about the many characteristics of mushrooms that make them a new symbol of queer community. Our “Shroom Boom” episode takes us through some new avenues where communities are connecting through fungi.
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Heather Gray joins Stephanie Shonekan during this episode to discuss the Bette Midler and Eddie and Gerald Levert versions of “Wind Beneath My Wings,” a song about love, death and what it does to those who live on. It’s a ballad that especially resonates with people who lost loved ones to the September 11 attacks in 2001. And in this episode, Stephanie and Heather also discuss how this song helps them treasure their relationships with their parents.
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The third season of Cover Story with Stephanie Shonekan is kicking off with a guest who’s pretty familiar with the show by now: our recording engineer, Nat Kuhn. Nat and Stephanie discuss “Killing Me Softly” and the power music holds to make us feel known, even at a level that’s surprisingly personal. Plus, Nat plugs in his bass to bring you an in-studio performance that mashes up elements of both Roberta Flack and The Fugees’ versions of the song.
