Detroit native Tonya Mosley joins Terry Gross as co-host of NPR's 'Fresh Air'
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During the finale of this season's “Truth Be Told” podcast, Tonya Mosley shared the story of her grandmother Ernestine, who grew up on a farm in Mississippi and moved to Detroit at 17 as part of the Great Migration of Black men and women from the Jim Crow South.
Mosley described how her grandmother, who turns 97 in July, used to clean houses for white people and later worked the night shift as a hospital nursing assistant. But she dreamed of becoming a public speaker and delivering speeches to riveted audiences.
“Do you know that that’s a blessing, to have somebody listen to you talk?” Ernestine said at one point.
A grandmother's dream has become her granddaughter's reality. Mosley, a former co-host and correspondent for "Here & Now" on National Public Radio, is the new co-host of “Fresh Air with Terry Gross."
It's the first time that Gross has had an official co-host in the nearly 50-year history of the Peabody Award-winning program. "Fresh Air" currently runs on more than 650 NPR stations and draws almost 5 million listeners each week (and another 4 million weekly podcast downloads). Mosley has been a contributing interviewer since 2021.
"Tonya's wide range of knowledge and experience, her warm inviting presence, and her ability to make a deep connection with guests, make her a perfect fit for our show," said Gross — who is continuing in her role as “Fresh Air” host and co-executive producer — in a statement in late April.
"I'm thrilled that she is our new co-host, and I know our listeners will be, too."
Revered for the in-depth, often revealing nature of its 45-minute interviews, “Fresh Air” provides a space in the news media where actors, directors, writers, comedians, historians and musicians can talk thoughtfully about their lives without having to revert to sound bites or stick to promoting their projects.
Led by Gross for more than 45 years (and broadcast nationally by NPR since 1985), the show continues to set the standard for long conversations that are personal without being prying, respectful without being cloying and always driven by genuine curiosity and empathy.
For Mosley, who has interviewed everyone from Halle Berry and Brooke Shields to Michelle Yeoh and Wanda Sykes for "Fresh Air," it’s the latest step in a career path that, in some ways, stretches all the way back to her Motor City childhood.
Born and raised in Detroit, Mosley grew up on the west side in a neighborhood near 7 Mile Road and the Southfield Freeway. By age 5, she was doing "interviews" by carrying around a tape recorder to record her relatives during Sunday family dinners.
She credits her grandfather, an avid consumer of news, with giving her a small tape recorder and inspiring her to use it. According to Mosley, he loved to record their family gatherings with one of those bulky, pre-smartphone video cameras.
By middle school, Mosley had earned the nickname Scoop from a friend’s father. “Every time I’d go over to their house, he was like: ‘What bit of information are you going to share with us now? What do you have now, Scoop?’” Like her grandfather, she read the Detroit Free Press avidly and started writing letters to staffers at a young age. “Mitch Albom was my main person. I think I would write him once a week,” she remembers. “And he would write me back.”
A 13-year-old Mosley was invited to visit the Free Press, where she got to meet Robert McGruder, the executive editor known for championing diversity. The trip came about after Louise Reid Ritchie, who headed the Free Press high school apprentice program, spoke to her Emerson Middle School class. “She said I was the only one focused and listening to her,” recalls Mosley.
A few years later, Mosley applied to become a 1993 summer apprentice. During that time, the program was open only to students from schools that had their newspapers printed by the Free Press. That didn’t include Mosley's Redford High School, but her dedication and perseverance convinced the Free Press to make an exception in her case.
“It was a life-changing experience,” she says of writing her first professional stories, being edited and getting to see them in print. Even back then, she was drawn to big-picture stories that vividly profiled people and events. “At the time, everyone wanted to be a hard news reporter. And I just thought the best place in the entire building was The Way We Live section, (which was) about life and society,” she says of the former Free Press features section.
Mosley earned a scholarship from Ford Motor Co. to attend the University of Missouri in Columbia, home to a prestigious school of journalism. Her early years there weren’t easy, she admits, explaining that she didn’t know how to be a college student at first. While taking classes, she also held an overnight job at a small TV station, KMIZ, where she learned the basics of audio and teleprompter work. Rising through the ranks, she was offered a job as a morning news producer immediately upon graduating.
Mosley could have stuck with TV news producing, but she wanted to return home to Michigan and eventually worked her way to a brief stint as a writer for Detroit’s NBC affiliate, WDIV-TV. There, she confided to one of its rising talents, Shon Gables, then a reporter-anchor (and now an anchor in Atlanta), that she was interested in switching to reporting.
Gables, whom she describes as a mentor, advised Mosley to leave Detroit and find a reporting job in a smaller TV market to gain experience.
That launched a reporting and anchoring career in TV that began in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and extended to Louisville, Kentucky, Seattle and the short-lived Al Jazeera America network. After spending nearly a year in Palo Alto, California, in the John S. Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, Mosley then worked for WBUR-FM, Boston’s NPR station, and KQED-FM, San Francisco's NPR site, where she was the Silicon Valley bureau chief.
During those yeears, Mosley won many awards for her reporting, including a 2016 Emmy for the PBS series “Beyond Ferguson” and an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association for the public radio series “Black in Seattle.” She says she always was drawn to NPR, both as a listener and a journalist. During her Seattle TV years, she says: “I had one photographer call me the public radio of television, because I loved the storytelling component of NPR and I wanted to infuse that into television news.”
In 2019, Mosley became a co-host of “Here & Now," a role she filled from Los Angeles, where she still lives. Once the COVID-19 lockdown arrived in March 2020, she spent two years of the pandemic hosting the show from her closet, which served as a makeshift home studio. Among the many topics she covered during those long, difficult months were Detroit-based stories on the heavy toll of the pandemic upon the city, the “stop the count” protests that attempted to disrupt the tallying of Detroit’s 2020 presidential election ballots and the 20th anniversary of Detroit music superstar Aaliyah’s untimely death.
Mosley shifted to a correspondent role for “Here & Now” in January 2022, prompted by turning points like the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. She covered the attack live as it unfolded and remembers trying to figure out exactly what was happening.
”It felt like such an assault on my humanity and, really, on all of our humanity. That was a point for me where I felt like I needed to go back to the foundation of who I am as a journalist and that’s being out in the world and understanding and talking to people.”
Another factor that had been building for a while was the change in social media that she noticed from her Facebook page, which since her time in Seattle had been an effective way to connect with the public.
"I felt like I had a real deep sense of the pulse of the Pacific Northwest and I could see that Facebook page shift so dramatically over those years," she says. "And these same people who welcomed me in their homes, there was such hatred that they were spewing on Facebook, it felt like maybe I didn’t know people at all.”
In 2019, Mosley acquired the rights to the "Truth Be Told" podcast and became host of the revamped version. It is described like this: "We’re the friend you call after a long day. The one who gets it. Through soul-nourishing conversations, host Tonya Mosley explores Black liberation with some of the greatest thinkers of our time." The podcast's fifth season, which ended in May, looks at the use of psychedelics to help deal with racial trauma.
Taking on the co-host role with “Fresh Air” was exciting and a little daunting, according to Mosley, who has described joining Gross as a co-host as “a tremendous honor.”
“It’s the type of work that I’ve always wanted to do. … The art of conversation in many ways, it feels like it’s transitioning. Our attention spans are shorter. … A slowed-down, meaningful conversation that allows us to see elements of humanity from people that we know and admire or don’t know and want to know more about, it’s tremendous (for) our ability to understand ourselves and the world,” says Mosley.
She calls Gross a master of the long-form interview, adding, "I think I have my way as well. I just look forward to being able to deepen that skill.”
Going forward, Mosley is focusing on the present, not on how or whether her role will evolve. “Terry will still be doing the number of interviews that she’s been doing, which is about two to three a week. And I will do two to three a week," she says.
For listeners, that means “they’ll be able to have a range of interviews from Terry’s perspective, which they’ve always known and loved, and then from my perspective, which adds a lens that is based on my life experience — the experiences as a Black woman that’s lived lots of places and experienced lots of things.”
And someone who, no matter where her journey takes her next, will always be proud to call Detroit home.
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
'Fresh Air'
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: NPR's 'Fresh Air' welcomes Detroit native Tonya Mosley as co-host
