When it comes to hard-hitting informative impact, Converge hit gold with “The Morning Update Show,” spearheaded by the personalities and passions of hosts Trae Holiday and Omari Salisbury in 2020. Looking back at the early days of the show beginning at its conception in response to the pandemic, “The Morning Update Show” quickly transformed from a short-term project focused on informing people about the health crisis to a pillar of street-level coverage of local and national news in Seattle and beyond that felt like having a morning cup of coffee with your community. 

From the murder of George Floyd to the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests across Seattle, Holiday and Salisbury got their footing while covering some of the most impactful issues and events facing the Black community in the past five years. Thrown into the fire, Salisbury and Holiday built their hosting chops from the ground up as a dynamic duo in Seattle media, eventually going on to host Converge’s shows “The Day With Trae” and “The Big O Show,” respectively. 

After running for 26 months, the show aired its final episode in the week of May 30, 2022. Salisbury wrote that the decision to end the show was a personal one, driven by the need to heal from the mental and physical toll of covering the unprecedented events of the past two years, including police violence, murders, the impacts of Covid-19, and the gun violence epidemic. But just as “The Morning Update Show” set the groundwork for Converge’s evolution in television, the show’s early days remind us of how far we have come in just five years, and more importantly, how far we have left to go.