Totally Tubular
Spring 2007
Alumni Profile - Class of ’91
| Television-industry wannabes and veterans alike would kill for one good job in the business. Not Julie Chen BA ’91 – she already has two enviable TV gigs, one on each coast: co-anchoring Manhattan-based The Early Show, CBS’s live morning news and entertainment program, and hosting last summer’s Big Brother, CBS’s primetime reality series. But then, that was the career plan: The first-generation American, whose first language was Mandarin, set her sights on broadcast journalism as a child in Queens, N.Y. “[My mom] said as a joke one time that that’s what I should do for a living when I grow up,” says Chen, whose only real role model was New York’s lone Asian female newscaster, Kaity Tong. Her fate was sealed in high school when out of the blue she received a letter from the USC School of Journalism (now USC Annenberg School for Communication). “It was like meant to be that I went there.” At USC, Chen wrote for the Daily Trojan while learning on-air skills in broadcast classes that led to her first resume tape, featuring a story she shot at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. After graduation, she spent four years in the ABC News Los Angeles bureau before landing stints as a local-news reporter, first at WDTN-TV in Dayton, Ohio, then at WCBS-TV in New York City. In mid-1999, while at WCBS, the network “borrowed” her to anchor CBS Morning News. When The Early Show was launched that November, she was the natural choice to come aboard as news anchor. CBS revamped the program in 2002, naming Chen one of four co-anchors to do both news and features. More recently, she added another title to her resume – boss’s wife – when she married CBS’s chief executive, Leslie Moonves. And then there’s the career anomaly: Big Brother, the Survivor-like series that turns the camera on a houseful of strangers 24/7 and evicts them one by one, with the winner scoring $500,000. No one was more surprised by the offer to host than Chen herself, whose initial reaction was, “Why me?” Turns out “they wanted someone who had live broadcast skills who could do interviews,” she says. Still, as a newswoman – who traveled to Egypt after the 9/11 attacks to track down the father of lead hijacker Mohammed Atta, and did heart-wrenching interviews with widows of the tragedy – she needed convincing. “I remember asking [the head of CBS News], ‘If I do this, is this going to be a problem if one day I want to do 60 Minutes?’ And he said, ‘Probably. ... But we could make you do this, this could be an assignment. You can’t refuse an assignment.’ So I thought I’d better do this.” After seven seasons, Chen has no regrets. She calls last summer’s Big Brother “a fun little escape for me.” Even detractors don’t faze her – like the fansite that dubbed her something less than flattering. “My best friend from college called me one day and said, ‘You know, they call you the Chenbot.’ I said, ‘What?’ She said, ‘Chenbot, like robot, because you’re robotic.’ ” And why? Because of the mechanical way she delivers her signature phrase, “but first.” The site even runs a compilation video of her saying just those two words, edited from numerous episodes. “When I watched it, it was so funny because I really was robotic,” Chen admits. “I said it the same way every time. All you saw of me that was different was my outfits.” She adds with a laugh: “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I am the Chenbot!’ ” – Sandy Siegel |
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