KQED announced the hiring of Lily Jamali as cohost and correspondent of its premiere statewide daily news program The California Report (TCR). Jamali comes to KQED from Bloomberg TV Canada where she had served as anchor and executive producer since early 2017. She will report from KQED’s San Francisco studios beginning August 27. She will share hosting duties with current host John Sepulvado, who will begin reporting from Southern California.
“Lily’s experience, broad editorial range and multifaceted background as an anchor, reporter and producer, makes her an ideal fit for TCR,” says Holly Kernan, KQED’s vice president, news. “Not only are we getting a dream hire, but her arrival creates an opportunity for John to report out of Southern California. This greatly enhances our responsiveness and our ability to offer deeper reporting and analysis of news that affects all Californians, regardless of where they live and work.”
At Bloomberg TV Canada, Jamali steered markets and economics coverage for her broadcast Bloomberg Markets: Canada, interviewing newsmakers including Italian President Sergio Mattarella and Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar, as well as several ministers in Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's cabinet. As executive producer, she was part of the team that helped launch Bloomberg TV's partnership with Canada's Business News Network (BNN) which began earlier this year.
Prior to joining Bloomberg TV Canada, Jamali covered technology and finance from San Francisco and New York for Reuters TV. At Reuters, she provided coverage from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland and the Aspen Ideas Festival among others. Before joining Reuters, Lily reported for NBC News Mobile (English and Spanish) and several local news stations including New York 1 News and KRCR, the ABC affiliate in Redding, where she started her broadcast career.
In addition to her time at Bloomberg and Reuters, Jamali has traveled the world as a freelance correspondent. In 2012, she was given a travel grant by PRI/BBC's The World, which sent her to Brazil to report on public safety in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and the impact of the Eurozone crisis on immigration. Other awards and grants include a South Asian Journalists Association Reporting Fellowship to cover the impact of climate change on the Maldives, the National Press Photographers Association's Paul Threlfall Award, and a Mid-Career Grant from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Jamali also won Columbia Journalism School's Leslie Sander Social Justice Award for a documentary she co-directed and produced on Irish immigrants returning to Ireland from the Bronx. She holds an M.B.A. in Finance from New York University's Stern School of Business, and is fluent in Farsi, Spanish and French.