Dayna Roselli, an eight-year reporter and anchor at KLAS Channel 8 and one of the city’s more prominent and popular media figures, has left the station. Her final broadcast was Monday morning.
Today, the station announced that a new morning team of Las Vegas newcomers Cale Hamaker and Shauna Khorrami would begin anchoring the 4 to 7 a.m. newscast beginning July 30. They will join weather anchor Sherry Swensk and traffic reporters Brian Loftus (who anchored this morning's newscast) and Ken Smith on the telecast. Hamaker arrives from WOFL-TV in Orlando, Fla., and also worked at KSTP-TV in St. Paul/Minneapolis; WSYM-TV, Lansing, Mich.; and WHO-TV in Des Moines, Iowa. Khorrami worked at KSTU-TV in Salt Lake City and KTLA in Los Angeles.
In the interim, KLAS News Director Ron Comings said reporters Jessica Lovell and Patranya Bhoolsuwan would fill in most of the morning newscasts.
In an e-mail message, Comings indicated that the decision was the station's and was owed to an effort to increase KLAS's morning ratings. He wrote:
"We appreciate Dayna's dedication and hard work over the past eight years. We wish her much success in the future. We are not satisfied with our position in the mornings, and that has led us to some difficult decisions. This is one of several changes we are making to better serve our morning viewers."
Reached this afternoon via text, Roselli said she could not comment at this time about her departure from Channel 8 and can't talk about the move until she speaks with her agent. Her bio on the station’s official website was no longer active as of this morning.
A native of Rochester, N.Y., Roselli started as a traffic reporter at KLAS in 2004 and gravitated toward a mix of entertainment and local news reporting when Dave McCann and she joined the station’s morning team in 2008. She signed a contract extension in September. In May, amid a highly publicized sendoff, McCann left the station for a job as lead anchor at KSL-TV in Salt Lake City. Another longtime member of the KLAS broadcast team, Calvert Collins, left this month for the Fox affiliate in Dallas.
The suddenness of Roselli's move is reflected in her tweet after signing her new deal at Channel 8, as she told her followers, "Just signed a new contract at @8NewsNow, you're stuck w/me #Vegas! I'm honored 2 work 4 such a respectable news station in the city I love."
Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWithTheDish.
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