Best Local Interviewer

Earlier this year, Michael Krasny celebrated his 10th anniversary as host of Forum, the KQED public affairs radio show that runs every weekday from 9 to 11 a.m. Over that decade, the San Francisco State English professor has established himself as a reasoned, intelligent, and quick-witted interviewer, always well-informed, who stands out with ease among the Bay Area's lackluster broadcast news personalities. Forum touches all bases: national and local, news and arts, business and technology, health and entertainment. Krasny's ability to ask insightful questions about any topic is the program's strength, and he's a very capable moderator, often shifting smoothly from, say, a panel discussion of state budgetary problems in the first hour to a one-on-one interview with an obscure anthropologist in the second. If you sometimes wish he'd ask tougher questions of pre-eminent San Francisco figures -- Chronicleeditor Phil Bronstein, especially, gets off the hook -- you have to give Krasny credit for tackling topics, whether of the hard news or academic discourse variety, that pop up on precious few other talk-radio shows in the country. Here's hoping he lasts another 10 years.