And Now the News... Soledad O’Brien Brings An Ethnic Blend to NBC
By Terry Jackson from http://www.hispanicmagazine.com/2001/jun/Features/soledad.html

When NBC Weekend Today show anchor Soledad O’Brien traces her ethnicity, she needs more than a family tree—she needs a globe.

A rising NBC News star rumored to be in line for Katie Couric’s top job at Today should Couric decide to start her own syndicated talk show, the freckled O’Brien is the daughter of a black Cuban mom and an Irish-Australian father. There’s even some Italian in the mix.

“ You should see my Census form,’’ she says with a bright laugh.

She’s the only person to win the Hispanic Achievement Award in Communications, and be named to Irish American Magazine’s Top 100 Irish Americans. She also is a member of both the National Association of Black Journalists and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

Her mother, Estella, is a retired New York City teacher who moved from Cuba in 1958. In 1959, while at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, she met and married Edward O’Brien, a mechanical engineering professor from Toowoomba, Australia.

O’Brien says that in 1959 interracial marriage was illegal in Baltimore, so the couple eloped to Washington, D.C.

Christened María de la Soledad O’Brien by her father—“He doesn’t even speak Spanish”—O’Brien grew up on Long Island, the fifth of six children, and attended Smithtown High School East in St. James, N.Y.

From there, she went to Harvard University with thoughts of becoming a doctor. In her junior year, O’Brien worked as an intern of a different sort: A lowly production assistant at WBZ-TV in Boston.

“Something clicked and I knew that this is what I wanted to do,” she says.

Saying goodbye to Harvard at age 21, O’Brien joined the news staff at WBZ as a news writer and producer. Then she moved to New York and NBC News, where she produced health and science segments for Bob Bazell. In 1993 she went west to KRON-TV in San Francisco as an on-air reporter before getting her first national show, The Know Zone, which she hosted for two seasons on The Discovery Channel.

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‘I was speaking recently to a Latina sorority and I looked out across the audience and I saw a lot of people like me. The categories that once defined all of us are blurring.’

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“It wasn’t strictly a science and technology show for kids, but it kind of had a kid bent to it,” the Emmy-winner says. “We covered science in a conversational tone and tried to find unusual ways to explain things.”

That prepared her well for her next leap up the TV ladder. MSNBC was still in its formative stages in 1996 when it tapped O’Brien to anchor a new show called The Site. It was a fast-paced, off-the-cuff program designed to capture viewers hooked on this new phenomenon called the Internet.

“I had a PC when that job came up, but I made it clear in my interview that I was not a technologist,” she says. “I didn’t do spread sheets.

“Andy Lack [NBC News president] made it clear they wanted The Site geared so someone’s mom would know what we were talking about.”

O’Brien became a cult icon and TV-Internet sex symbol. Salon, the online magazine, dubbed her “The Goddess of the Geeks.” At one point she reportedly received at least 1,000 e-mails alone concerning the tantalizing rumor that she sports a tattoo—that’s just “a vicious little rumor,” O’Brien wrote one questioner.

Good looks are an asset to women on TV, but it was brains and the ability to think on her feet that kept O’Brien’s career moving. From The Site O’Brien moved to the anchor chair of MSNBC’s Morning Blend news show and assignments for NBC Nightly News. In July 1999 she was named co-anchor of Weekend Today, alongside David Bloom.

Married for five years to investment banker Brad Raymond, O’Brien recently gave birth to the couple’s first child, Sofia Elizabeth.

O’Brien believes her multiethnic background makes her a reflection of the new America.

“I was speaking recently to a Latina sorority and I looked out across the audience and I saw a lot of people like me,” she says. “The categories that once defined all of us are blurring.”

Will that ability to represent a new generation help catapult her to become Couric’s replacement, whenever that position becomes vacant?

“I’ve gotten to fill in a couple of times and I really enjoy it,’’ she says. “But I already have a job and that’s where my focus is right now.’’ H