Tamron Hall, the keynote speaker Wednesday at the Promax Station Summit at The Mirage in Las Vegas, held sway in front of a full house of local TV marketing executives. Seated on stage with her executive producer, Bill Geddie, Hall won over the audience with her story of humble origins and hard work in local TV news.
Tamron Hall, the keynote speaker Wednesday at the Promax Station Summit at The Mirage in Las Vegas, held sway in front of a full house of local TV marketing executives, not with fancy television production, but by being herself.
Seated on stage with her executive producer, Bill Geddie, Hall won over the audience with her story of humble origins and hard work in local TV news. And this is a crowd used to high-end production promos for new TV shows, not an easy crowd to wow with just your personality.
But it’s Hall’s personality that is just a few months away from being the guiding force for a new daytime TV show set to launch nationwide on Sept. 9.
https://www.facebook.com/TamronHall/videos/630970097325407/
Hall talked about her small-town roots, from little ol’ Lulling, Texas, born to a single mom, raised with help from her share-cropper granddad, a fact she said she always keeps in mind, “Don’t forget where you’re from.”
Hall graduated from Temple University with a broadcast journalism degree. She told me backstage that she often drove the 1,500 miles from home in Texas to Temple alone, a fact that impressed me, being a Philly guy who spent some time living in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area.
Hall started working in local TV news at KBTX, the CBS affiliate in the 89th market of Bryan-College Station, Texas.
With stints in local TV news in Dallas and Chicago, Hall jumped onto the national stage in 2014, becoming the first black woman to host Today on NBC.
But Hall said working in local TV news will be her best asset, her foundation, for being the host of a daily talk show, where she learned to talk to people after tragedies like tornadoes and train wrecks.
Hall talked about how she experienced tragedy herself. In 2004, her sister, Renate, was murdered, a victim of domestic violence.
Hall told the audience that she partly blamed herself, because although she witnessed signs of her sister’s abuse, didn’t call the police because she was too embarrassed as to how it would affect her status as a TV news woman in Chicago.
Hall said that inspired her to take up the issue of domestic violence in her sister’s name. In 2016, Hall earned an Edward R. Murrow Award for her reports on domestic abuse.
Hall has a lot going on in her life besides being the host of a new national TV talk show. At age 48, Hall gave birth just eight weeks ago to a baby boy, Moses, something you can expect she’ll be talking about on her new show.
Hall’s daytime show will air on all the ABC O&Os, except WLS in Chicago, as well as in other markets by some Hearst and Sinclair stations.
In an article from March in Good Housekeeping, the show’s executive producer, Bill Geddie, said: “Tamron Hall is the real thing we’ve been searching for in daytime talk. Tamron will bring her abundant wit, style, intelligence and warmth to her show. She has the unparalleled breadth of experience to talk and listen to all sides and bring folks together.”
Got a media job you’re looking to fill? Why not place an ad on TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center?
Comments (0)
Reader Interactions