SiriusXM’s Laura Coates and Julie Mason find 'perfect serendipity' with schedule swap
Laura Coates is getting a chance to live her best morning person life, and Julie Mason can finally hit the snooze button as the pair swap time slots on their respective SiriusXM shows.
Starting this week, Coates’s eponymous show will make the move from afternoons to the 7 to 9 a.m. spot on SiriusXM’s POTUS, channel 124. Instead of hosting “Julie Mason Mornings,” the former Houston Chronicle White House correspondent will take over the 3 to 6 p.m. gig with “The Julie Mason Show.”
It’s a schedule switcheroo that both agree is mutually beneficial.
“It’s so funny because when I would go on [Mason’s] show in the morning as a guest, we would have this joke because I would say, ‘I hit the ground running. I'm wide awake.’ And she’s always like, ‘For the love of God, what is in your coffee?’” Coates told ITK with a laugh.
“I’m like, ‘I don’t drink coffee.’ And she’d say, ‘For the love of God, get off my show!’” Coates said.
Mason said she originally was thrilled to launch a morning show in 2021, considering it a “huge promotion.”
“But in the end, I felt like what I gave up in terms of having a life, it was just too hard. And I'm not even talking about work/life balance. It's like getting up at 4 a.m. to work, you're tired all day,” Mason said.
“I was exhausted all the time. And then I’d go to bed at 8 o'clock at night. So I didn't see anyone and I wasn't doing anything except just being in my house. I felt like a plant that got no sunshine.”
So Mason, who used to host “The Press Pool” on POTUS in the afternoons, asked the powers that be at SiriusXM to consider moving her back to a later timeslot.
“It worked out great because Laura wanted to go to mornings, so it was brilliant. And I've never seen it happen like that before. It was just perfect serendipity,” Mason exclaimed.
Coates, who also hosts an 11 p.m. show on CNN and serves as its senior legal analyst, said shut-eye isn’t really part of her current personal life equation.
“I'm one of those people who thinks I'll sleep when I'm dead, and I just I try to suck as much as I can out of the day.”
“Ever since I've had my children, I've been operating on far less sleep, and I consider it my version of intermittent fasting,” Coates, the mom of an 8- and 10-year-old, quipped. While she tries to clock in six hours of sleep, she said, “I'm not averse to a power nap during the day, but really I operate at a very high energy level.”
Coates, who’s been with SiriusXM since 2017, said hitting the air at the crack of dawn will enable her show to book more lawmakers as guests.
“My show before was oftentimes during the voting time of Congress, and so we'd still be able to have them on, but this is an opportunity: No one's escaping the questions.”
Mason said in addition to helping her avoid setting a 4 a.m. alarm, a later show offers other benefits.
“One of the things we can do and are going to do is have a little bit longer segments,” Mason said.
“With afternoons, we can go a little longer. We can marinate in it a little more, get a little more in depth.”
Being able to hit the town without a before-dark bedtime, Mason said, also has its advantages.
“Now I can do stuff again, which I think informs my work and informs journalism to be out, and hearing things, and talking to people. You have to do that. If you just sort of live in a cloister, the work suffers.”
But the new schedule is still going to take some getting used to.
Earlier this week, Mason said she “woke up in a panic at 3:55 a.m.”
“I was like crazy, bolting out of bed,” Mason said. “And then I remembered. And I slept in until 8 a.m. and it felt like a holiday. It felt like an indulgence. It was like a spa weekend on a Monday. It was glorious.”