While it will still produce a segment that highlights new local lifestyle hotspots in Utah at 6:30 a.m. every Saturday on Fox-13, the program will feature a new co-host, Jacque Gray.
Gray, who hails from Bountiful, will join company founder/host Larry Feldman and replace former co-host John Goulet, on the new season opener on Oct. 20.
Feldman said a new host was pertinent to the evolution of the program.
"With the numbers that have grown over the past year, we're attracting 140,000 viewers per week," Feldman told The Park Record. "With John leaving, we knew we needed to add some variety in the program. We knew we needed to have a talented female co-host."
So, Feldman's staff embarked on a statewide search and went through more than 100 applications.
"We dwindled things down, which brought us to Jacque, who won our hearts," he said. "We're going to change things up a bit a little more now that we have a young and vibrant co-host as opposed to an old man.
"When John was with us, we joked that we had 'middle-aged' covered, so now we have Jacque, who is intelligent and young, the goal is to make our features more than just questions and answers, but about the experience."
Gray is excited to join Wasatch 360TV.
"I grew up in Utah and moved to Southern California and Europe to pursue an acting career for a number of years and then I moved back earlier this year," Gray said. "Utah has changed a lot since I lived here. It's a totally different place than what I left behind. And this is a great way for me to kind of reintroduce myself to the state."
The biggest change, she said, has happened in Park City.
"I didn't recognize the place," she said. "We went up to Deer Valley in January and it's so much more than just Stein Eriksen Lodge now."
Executive producer Mark Lukes said with Gray aboard, the segments will try to focus on places that lay off the beaten path.
"We want to find more obscure stuff," he said. "It's amazing how much stuff there is to do if you look.
"For instance, we recently did a piece on the Pawsatch Snow Dogs, and even though I'm a dog lover, I didn't even know they existed."
Other new episodes this season will feature skydiving and ski instruction.
"We're planning on a skydiving episode that will not only have interviews with the jumpers on ground, but also get more interactive and strapped in for actual jumps," Feldman said. "My wife informed me that we need to up the life insurance policy."
Crews will also document Gray, who is not a skier, taking ski classes throughout the season.
"We're going to see if we can see her go from bunny slopes to leaping off cliffs," Feldman said with a laugh.
"We've hit a lot of the basic stuff in our first year that we would normally feature, and now the key is to find some of the things that exist below the surface," he said.
The new plans wouldn't have begun happening if it wasn't for the popularity of the past season.
"I had a meeting with Fox 13's general manager Tim Ermish and he said we're bringing in some good ratings for the channel," Feldman said. "He requested that we start the new season a week early. So, that's why we're going up on Oct. 20."
One thing Feldman wanted to clarify is that Wasatch 360TV is not what most people think of when they hear the words "paid-programming."
"We're not those typical 'chop-and-dice' infomercials," Feldman said. "We're all about what's hot in Utah and the Wasatch Front and Back.
"The back is huge here because of all the ski resorts, hotels and restaurants. We tend to be up here 60 percent of our time finding new and exciting things to tell our audience about. So, a lot of our stuff is Wasatch-Back driven."
The company just finished a piece for Promontory and just got hired by Waldorf Astoria to do a 10-minute video brochure and we're doing something for High West, Feldman said.
"Instead of going in like a news crew with cameras blazing, we're scripting more productions and taking more time with the shoot," he said "We would love to do more for Park City as much as we can."
For more information about Wasatch 360TV, visit www.wasatch360TV.com.
Font Resize
