Linda Ellerbee

Journalist

"Even at age 10 it was fairly clear to me that if the Soviet Union dropped a hydrogen bomb on us, climbing under my little wooden desk and putting my hands over my head wasn’t going to help. I spent a lot of time afraid of what’s going to happen because I would see these images on television of Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the UN and the tests of the bombs that were being conducted, and I would go to bed terrified. No one talked to me about this. My parents didn’t talk to me about what I was watching, my school didn’t talk to me, no one in the church talked to me, certainly no one on television addressed my fears as a kid of the news that I was seeing. Don’t you think I didn’t think about that years later when we went to start Nick News."

About This Interview

In her Archive interview, noted journalist Linda Ellerbee talks about her beginnings as a writer, who transitioned to working as an on-air correspondent in local news. She discusses moving to network television, working on such programs as Weekend, the NBC Nightly News. She then discusses the formation of her production company Lucky Duck Productions, and its keystone news series for kids Nick News. Throughout the interview Ellerbee discusses the state of the news industry as well as her philosophy about how news should be covered on television. Linda Ellerbee was interviewed in New York, NY on June 9, 2010; Karen Herman conducted the three-hour interview.