Paul Kennedy (host)

Paul Kennedy is a broadcast journalist who worked at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, in various contexts, from 1978 until his retirement in 2019 He started as a freelance contributor to a wide range of radio shows, but quickly morphed into being a frequent fill-in replacement host, and eventually earned solid reputation as an award-winning documentarist. He is perhaps best known as anchor of the long-running CBC Radio One institution called IDEAS, which he hosted, five nights a week. for twenty seasons, starting in 1999 news|url=https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/cbc-radio-ideas-host-nahlah-ayed-1.5187374%7Ctitle=CBC News foreign t Nahlah Ayed to host CBC Radio's Ideas - The veteran journalist will take over from Paul Kennedy in September}}</ref>

In 1977, he researched, wrote and voiced his first documentary segment (on the subject of the fur trade), titled The Fur Trade Revisited.[1] The segment was part of special Ideas presentation entitled Red Man, White World.

While hosting Ideas, Kennedy continued to prepare and produce an ongoing sequence of hour-long documentaries, many of which inspired various contributions to other media outlets. He penned the liner notes for a 1998 Juno Award-winning Esprit Orchestra CD, featuring the music of Canadian composer Colin McPhee, who had previously been the subject of a two-hour Kennedy radio documentary. In 2006, CBC-TV's "The National" won the best feature documentary Gemini Award for a segment about Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne", that Kennedy wrote and narrated, loosely based on an earlier IDEAS episode called "Nominating Leonard Cohen for the Nobel Prize.