The good news for Renee Montagne is that, as of today, she is no longer the interim co-host of NPR's Morning Edition. She and Steve Inskeep were announced Saturday as the permanent [by radio standards] bi-coastal replacements for Bob Edwards. The bad news for Montagne is that she'll have to keep rolling into the NPR West complex in Culver City before midnight and not emerging until the sun has been up long enough that most of Los Angeles is at work. (Inskeep anchors from Washington). From the NPR release:

Montagne joined NPR in 1980. She is well known to listeners, having done thousands of interviews, stories and series for NPR’s newsmagazines. Most recently, she traveled around Afghanistan to preview the elections there....

Montagne began her career as news director of San Francisco’s community radio station, KPOO, while a student at the University of California, Berkeley. She joined Morning Edition in 1989, and since then has conducted interviews on a wide variety of topics with newsmakers, including Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, and singer and composer Paul McCartney. Montagne was born in California and raised in various locales, including Hawaii and Arizona.

A Calendar story in today's Times focuses on Montagne in exploring the West Coast-ification of public radio (and says that the Culver City studios are being expanded, as are American Public Media's L.A. studios).