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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Canned peaches not only preserve fruit, but also time. The memory, the smell, the summer sun are all captured when the lid is sealed. But the past year has been rough for peaches. Some people drove for hours in search of fresh ones. In our namesake episode, Canned Peaches, we’re adventuring to a cannery that bottles up our nostalgia into glass jars full of all kinds of goodness. We’ll go fruit picking at a peach orchard, and follow the growers to the farmers’ market where we’ll join a long line of Missourians waiting for a bag of fresh peaches and talking about their peach dreams. This episode, we’re going in search of fresh fruit and discovering how canned peaches connect people through a complex food web that crosses time and space. -
The story of rice is a story of transformation. For host and producer Nina Mukerjee Furstenau, rice can start out in fields in the India of her memories and end up as a magical breakfast cereal, or maybe even the gooey, delightful Rice Krispies treats of our collective childhood memories. In this episode of Canned Peaches, we’ll adventure to an actual rice factory in southern Missouri where rice is “crisped” for all kinds of consumption, and we’ll hear how Nina can be delighted about food even in a very loud, very hot factory. We’ll journey to a Camp Fire Heartland kitchen to make Rice Krispies treats with the kids of the Saturday Club. And we’ll take a trip back in time to learn about the magical transformation made by “food shot from a gun!” All aboard the Magical Food Bus.
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Here's a roundup of headlines from across the mid-Missouri region. -
Here's a roundup of headlines from across the region.
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Somebody, somewhere, can’t get enough of chestnuts. Even though chestnuts seem to have phased out of American culture over the last hundred years or so and we don’t think of them as a big part of our diet anymore, farmers seem to be selling out of chestnuts year after year. In this episode, we’re going in search of the communities that can’t get enough of chestnuts. Our explorations will take us to a chestnut orchard, a kitchen where we’ll make chestnut soup, and an Italian restaurant on The Hill in St. Louis where a renowned Italian chef recalls his first teacher in the kitchen: his grandmother. This episode takes us on a magical food adventure to explore what it is that makes chestnuts a cultural cornerstone. And yes, in spite of producer Lauren Hines-Acosta’s best efforts to keep it out of this episode, you will hear that iconic holiday song. You know the one.
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A roundup of the morning's headlines from across the mid-Missouri region
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The Missouri Symphony Society is staging Mozart's opera 'The Marriage of Figaro' with a 'Mad Men' theme. -
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A roundup of regional headlines from the KBIA Newsroom.
