Baratunde Thurston moves west to host Pivot TV show ‘TakePart Live’

Baratunde Thurston is going to do something with the news. The Brooklynite is also apparently moving to the West Coast, where the rest of his company, Cultivated Wit, is headquartered.

He just announced that he’ll be host of Pivot TV’s TakePart Live, a nightly news show aimed at involving its viewers in the show and spurring them to action.

“I’m excited to join TakePart Live where I can join smart discussions on issues of the day and share my point of view and my beard with the American people,” Thurston said in a statement. One of his cohosts is John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain.

We weren’t going to suggest you follow him on Twitter because he’s moved away, but then he followed us this weekend so now we think you should too.

On a recent episode of TakePart Live, pegged to the release of the Snowden doc, Citizenfour, Thurston talks about government surveillance with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Rainey Reitman:

And, just because this is too good not to share, here’s what appears at the bottom of the press release announcing his new gig:

About Press Releases

For reasons no one can fully explain, documents like these still exist. Rather than a more personal and direct explanation of the news, an entire industry has sprouted around a more stilted format, complete with perfectly placed and perfectly safe quotes. After financing a billion-dollar military effort to destroy the press release format once and for all, our non-existent investors realized the effort had made no impact and decided, “If you can’t beat em, join em.” Now we’ll close with three sequential hash marks, again, for reasons no one can fully explain.