Sep 11 – Renee Shaw – Director of Public Affairs and Moderator at KET

Today’s speaker, Renee Shaw, is the Director of Public Affairs and Moderator at KET, currently serving as host of KET’s weeknight public affairs program Kentucky Edition, the signature public policy discussion series Kentucky Tonight, and statewide election specials. Through the years, she has also been the force behind legislative and Kentucky Supreme Court coverage, the weekly interview series Connections, townhall-style forums, and multi-platform initiatives around critical issues facing Kentuckians.

As an award-winning journalist, Renee has earned three regional Emmy awards from the Ohio Valley Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. And in 2023 the academy inducted Renee into the Silver Circle Society, one of its highest honors that recognizes television professionals who have performed distinguished service for 25 years or more. She earned a national media award from Mental Health America for her decades-long focus on the issues of mental health and opioid addiction, and the Green Dot Award for her coverage of domestic violence, sexual assault and human trafficking. She has been honored by various state agencies for her work on criminal justice reform and socio-economic issues, and by the Kentucky Press Association for excellence in public affairs programming.

Recognizing her collective body of work, Renee was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame in 2025, which called her “Kentucky’s leading TV news journalist.” A proud graduate of Western Kentucky University, she was inducted into its Hall of Distinguished Alumni in 2023. Previously, she was named to the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame.

Among her numerous honors from education and civic organizations are Women Leading Kentucky’s Governor Martha Layne Collins Leadership Award, the state media award from the Kentucky Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, recognition as a “Kentucky Trailblazer” by the UK Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, Berea College’s Service Award, the Coretta Scott King Spirit of Ivy Award by Alpha Kappa Alpha, one of The Kentucky Gazette’s inaugural “50 Most Notable Women in Kentucky Politics,” and the Community Action Council’s “Unapologetic Woman of the Year.”

Renee is a 2007 graduate of Leadership Kentucky, a CASA of Lexington board member and longtime member of the Frankfort/Lexington Chapter of The Links, an international organization of women of color committed to volunteer service. She has served on the boards of the Kentucky Historical Society and the Lexington Minority Business Expo.

From rural Tennessee, Renee was an only child in a household where public broadcasting was part of not just the daily routine, but of her early education. “Mister Rogers and Sesame Street and Electric Company, those were my early teachers. My mother and I would watch and rehearse the alphabet. But I also learned about diversity and appreciating differences.” It was this early exposure to public broadcasting and educational television that led her to pursue that as a career. Renee has worked at KET since 1997.

KET is Kentucky’s largest classroom, town hall, performance stage, history and science center, nature preserve, tour guide and more, providing trusted programming, lifelong learning opportunities and essential services used by more than two million people each week.

Rotary in Review

WHY STATEWIDE PUBLIC BROADCASTING STILL MATTERS

Renee Shaw came to The Mane on Main at our last meeting with equal parts clarity, conviction, and compassion, and the Rotary Club of Lexington was all the better for it. As KET’s director of public affairs and moderator of flagship programs including Kentucky Edition and Kentucky Tonight, Shaw offered a master class in what local public broadcasting does best: explain complex issues, cultivate civic trust, and surface solutions that move communities forward.

Shaw opened with an affectionate nod to the mentors and colleagues who sustain KET, from board leaders to legal staff and longtime teammates, then launched into the throughline of her remarks: journalism’s public purpose. Drawing on childhood memories of Electric Company and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Shaw explained how public media planted a professional calling. “Your parents are your first educator,” she said, “but my second educator was public broadcasting.” That early influence, she noted, still guides KET’s mission to produce programming “by, for, and about Kentucky.”

A recurring theme was trust, and the hard work required to earn and keep it. With national trust in media ebbing and audiences fragmenting across platforms, Shaw argued that local public media has a special responsibility to be fair, factual, and solutions-oriented. She described KET’s approach as “policy focused, people centered, and fact-based,” and reminded the audience that good journalism doesn’t tell people what to think, but what to think about.

Shaw outlined two storytelling frameworks central to KET’s work: solutions-driven and explanatory journalism. Solutions-driven reporting, she said, moves beyond problem-spotting to spotlight practical responses that can be adopted by other communities, the kind of reporting that can ask, “Is taxpayer money making a difference? What is the ROI?” Explanatory journalism, meanwhile, unpacks complex topics so viewers can actually understand them. Shaw cited a past project that demystified the grand jury process as an example of public broadcasting doing the civic heavy lifting.

Throughout, Shaw emphasized inclusion and local voice. KET’s statewide reach, from Paducah to Pikeville and Fulton to Florence, gives it a broad canvas, and she highlighted the network’s practice of embedding in communities for several days to produce deep, contextual coverage. The result: reporting that is informed by homegrown perspectives and useful to citizens and policymakers alike.

Shaw also shared recent and upcoming programming highlights. She described Kentucky Edition and Kentucky Tonight going on the road and previewed a three-hour documentary celebrating Lexington’s 250th anniversary. Narrated by local actor Josh Hopkins, Lexington: 250 Years will premiere at the Kentucky Theater on Monday, Oct. 13, with a public screening at 7 p.m., a project she said exemplifies KET’s role as “the portal of access” to civic life during legislative sessions and major state moments.

Before opening the floor for questions, Shaw returned to the ethical compass she follows, inspired by the late Jim Lehrer’s “commandments” of journalism: do nothing you cannot defend, cover stories with the care you’d want if the story were about you, assume multiple perspectives, and keep opinion separate from news. “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care,” she said, and that ethic, combining rigor with empathy, was the throughline of an afternoon that reminded Rotary members why a trusted, statewide public broadcaster still matters.

– Dan Koett