After 22 years greeting Austin first thing in the morning, Jennifer Stayton is hitting the snooze button.
KUT News’ longtime Morning Edition host will be moving to a later time slot on air, as well as focusing on special events and reporting on a soon-to-launch project about aging in Austin.
Prior to her early morning tenure with KUT, Stayton also spent a few years as the Morning Edition host for WAER in Syracuse, N.Y.
“So we’re pushing 25 years of getting up, you know, around 4 a.m., if not a bit earlier,” she told Jimmy Maas, KUT’s assistant program director. “I’m ready to sleep a little bit later, quite honestly.”
Stayton sat down with Maas to reflect on her journey to public radio and what comes next.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Jimmy Maas: Let’s go back down memory lane just a little bit here.
Jennifer Stayton: Good, because my memory’s not that great all the time.
You were raised here in Austin.
Yeah, I’m born and raised.
And then you went off to be educated at Williams.
Yeah, in Massachusetts.
And then you took your first job over in Western Mass.
Yeah, for a family-owned company of small radio stations. I’m not sure such a thing exists in many places anymore. These radio stations, I am not sure exist either.
But it was a blast. I was there for four years, did sales for a year, music hosting, news reporting, commercial producing, just about everything there was to do.
So how did you make the move over to Syracuse? What prompted you to get into public radio?
I decided that it was time to kind of explore what else was a possibility in the field. So I went and got a master’s degree in radio-television-film at Syracuse University. And like the University of Texas, they have a university-licensed public radio station, WAER. At the time, it was dual format jazz and NPR; it leans a little more heavily on NPR now.
So my first day there, I walked upstairs and just kind of walked in and said, “hey, I hear you all take interns in the newsroom.” Interned there as a graduate student, joined the staff part-time.
The Morning Edition host there got promoted to news director and said, “hey, could you just kind of learn this and sit in while we search for a host?” I stupidly said yes, not realizing that what came with that was waking up, you know, really early. But I did it, and I kind of fell in love with it.
And you got seasoned to some hardships: cold, snow, blizzards.
Oh, yeah. There’s nothing like driving to work, you know, pre-dawn in a snowstorm. The key is to get behind a snowplow. I learned that.
Yeah, well, no snowplows here. Suddenly you decided to return home.
Well, so I’d moved back to town in 2001, was unable to secure a radio job then. So I took a detour for a few years off the air, as we might say, but listened to KUT. I’d been listening since high school when I first heard about KUT.
When I moved back in 2001, I listened every morning on my drive to work, and I noticed that the Morning Edition host was not there. And I listened for several weeks and noticed that someone else was doing it. And I thought, are they searching for someone by any chance?
With a unique skill set.
With a unique skill set. So I emailed the station. They were in fact looking, so I applied and thought, well, if I’m ever going to get back into radio, it’s going to be now, now or never.
Fortunately, they took a chance on someone who had been out of radio for almost three years at that time, but I suppose was willing to get up early and come in. And so that was early 2004, and here we are in 2026.
Wow. And so again, you are moving, you’re not leaving. So do not panic. You are not losing Jennifer Stayton. You will hear her elsewhere on this station.
Talk a little bit about what you’re about to embark on.
I will be on the air from 9 to noon, Monday through Friday, once we have someone who is going to slide into Morning Edition; that’s going to take a few months.
So this schedule will also allow me maybe to slide in and host Austin Signal a few more times when Jerry [Quijano] needs a break from hosting duties, maybe hop into All Things Considered when, you know, folks are on vacation. Looking forward to kind of hopping around and hosting different things on the schedule.
And then, I know we’re gonna talk more about this later, but I’ll be doing some interviews, some special events, and some reporting around a project we are launching about aging in Austin.
Well, this is sad news, good news — great news for your sleep habits. Your circadian rhythm will return.
I don’t remember what it’s like to wake up in the daylight. It’s my decision to do this, but I gotta say, it is not an easy decision, because it has been the professional honor of a lifetime to do this job.
It’s the best job in the public radio system, I am convinced. And I have loved it dearly and will miss it dearly.
We will miss you, but we’re not gonna miss you completely. You know, you’re just moving to the house next door. You’re not leaving the neighborhood.
Right, right. No, exactly, exactly. I will still be here.
There will be more on this through the week as we celebrate Jennifer’s contribution, and certainly in the summer we will make a full-blown to-do of this and embarrass you greatly when the time is appropriate to hand over the keys to someone else.