Holly Gauntt, news director, KDVR-KWGN. Photo by J. Ostrow
Holly Gauntt, the newly installed news director at KDVR-KWGN, just arrived from KOMO Seattle, has come home. Back in the day, she served as housesitter and dog walker for her journalism professor at CU-Boulder, one Ed Sardella. He hired Gauntt for her first paying job in broadcast TV, putting together Sardella’s opinion poll four nights a week at Channel 9. (She later shared those duties with fellow intern Kim Christiansen.) Patti Dennis was the 5 p.m. producer at the time.
Raised in Littleton, the 1980 Arapahoe High School grad remembers when Arapahoe Road was dirt.
Now, after detours to the Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., TV markets, Gauntt intends to take on the market kingpin as she did in Seattle. Gannett’s KING has been the dominant Seattle station for a decade but under Gauntt KOMO proved a consistent challenger, regularly within a few tenths of a rating point. In Denver, Gannett’s KUSA is an even longer-standing No. 1, and by wider margins, but Gauntt sees vulnerabilities.
She’s still finding her way around the labyrinthine Fox31/Channel 2 building (she’s refreshingly candid about the current unbecoming set). Gauntt intends to “be more inclusive” in her KDVR-KWGN newsroom, tapping into staffers’ strengths, perhaps shuffling some positions. She plans to “give Channel 2 a lot more attention.” She shares the opinion of many viewers that rebranding it as “The Deuce” was a bad idea. Having grown up here, she notes, “that’s an iconic TV station.”
