It’s been a whirlwind few weeks for Fusion’s Alicia Menendez.
The Miami-based host of Fusion’s “Alicia Menendez Tonight” traveled from a Hispanic advocacy conference in LA to New York to guest co-host “The View” — and buy a wedding dress for her February nuptials — then on to a 10-day assignment in Jordan and Rwanda.
This week, the New Jersey native is back in New York to tape interview segments for “Alicia Menendez Tonight” with 17-year-old activist Malala Yousafzai and country music duo Florida Georgia Line, as well as speak to 150 girls at the Keds Brave Life Summit on Friday.
“It’s always great to go out and speak with younger audiences because I think the older I get, the more removed I am from that experience,” Menendez tells The Post. “To actually be in a room with your audience helps focus the content and the message.”
At 31, Menendez is hardly old for a TV anchor, but at Fusion — co-owned by Univision and ABC — she’s targeting a young, multi-cultural, millennial audience (average age of her producers: 24) who have mostly tuned out to traditional TV news.
And Menendez is not a traditional TV host — the daughter of US Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), she studied women, gender and sexuality at Harvard and was a host and producer at HuffPost Live before moving to Miami in June 2013 to join Fusion.
Her half hour, weeknight show, “Alicia Menendez Tonight” is an eclectic mix of commentary and newsmaker interviews that spans the high and low, from transgender rights to Justin Bieber. “If it’s a story that would appear on any other network from any other talent, it generally is a no-go or at least a yellow light,” she says.
“We’re really looking for stories that we feel we bring something unique to, because if there’s not [something unique] then there’s not really merit in doing it.”
Like last April, when Menendez decided to flip the script and have trans activist Janet Mock ask her questions in a critique on transgender interview tactics. Her favorite interviews tend to be those with up-and-comers, like YouTube star Laci Green, actress Gina Rodriguez of The CW’s upcoming “Jane the Virgin” and Cristela Alonzo, who has a new self-titled ABC sitcom.
“When you find somebody who is really special and on the verge of becoming a huge star or huge icon, they are willing to be real with you,” she says. “Once you get a really high-level celebrity … it’s much more difficult to have what feels like a conversation rather than an interview because they’re on message.”
Count that as a reason that Menendez doesn’t see herself filling one of the openings left on “The View.”
“One of the things that I’ve learned doing my show is that I don’t just want to be talent, I want to be a producer-talent, and it is really critical to me to have a hand in everything I create,” she says. “Right now I have the best gig in town.”
Fusion airs on Dish (Ch. 244) and FiOS (Ch. 107).