Friday, Dec. 18, 2009 | 2 a.m.
Sun Archives
Jon Ralston’s award-winning news discussion program, “Face to Face,” goes statewide in January.
For almost nine years, the program has been on Las Vegas ONE, a cable channel. It will move Jan. 4 to NBC affiliate stations KVBC Channel 3 in Las Vegas, KRNV Channel 4 in Reno and KENV Channel 10 in Elko, The Greenspun Corporation and Sunbelt Communications announced Thursday. The show also will be televised live in a new time slot, 4 p.m. weekdays.
“We are thrilled to be able to present Jon in a format that will give him a statewide forum to do what he does best,” Brian Greenspun, chairman of The Greenspun Corporation, said in a news release.
“This is the beginning of a great partnership,” Sunbelt Communications owner Jim Rogers said in the same release.
Ralston has covered Nevada politics for more than 20 years and is nationally recognized as an expert on the state’s political scene. He will continue to write columns for the Las Vegas Sun and In Business Las Vegas, as well as the Ralston Flash daily electronic subscription newsletter.
“I’m grateful for the tremendous opportunity to take what we have worked so hard to create to another level,” Ralston said. He added that he is confident that he, his executive producer, Dana Gentry, and producer Guy DeMarco “can work with the KVBC team to make ‘Face to Face’ a must-see daily program for viewers around the state. The basics will be the same — hard-hitting questions and pressing issues. But we hope to add new elements and features to make the show better than it ever was.”
“You can’t watch our program and be apathetic,” Gentry said. “We give viewers a reason to be invested in their community, whether it’s triggered by compassion or outrage. In addition to the interviews that make national news, like our two-parter with Doug Hampton, the husband of Sen. John Ensign’s former mistress, we also break stories that impact the community in diverse ways.
“This week we looked back at some of our exclusives. We reported how the son of the former governor managed to get confidential information on 250 unwitting citizens by using connections at Metro. We revealed the medical board’s efforts to impose a double standard on medical assistants working in the state and what appears to be an effort by plastic surgeons to stifle competition from medical spas. We also broke the story of late entertainer Danny Gans’ ownership of a pharmacy we later found to be concocting its own black-market version of a sexual dysfunction drug.”
Gentry, a native Nevadan, also plays a major role in another aspect of the developing partnership between Greenspun and Sunbelt — “In Business Las Vegas,” a half-hour weekly business program from Greenspun’s weekly business newspaper of the same name.
Gentry will be reunited with fellow veteran journalist Jeff Gillan as co-hosts of the program airing at 12:30 p.m. Fridays on KVBC starting Jan. 8.
The Greenspun-Sunbelt partnership began in October when Sunbelt started producing a weeknight newscast for KTUD Channel 14.
