Linda Ellerbee
Linda Ellerbee is an outspoken journalist; award-winning television producer, writer, and anchor; best-selling author; breast cancer survivor; a mother and grandmother; and one of the most sought-after speakers in America.
Ellerbee began her career at CBS, and then moved to NBC News where, after years of covering national politics, she pioneered the late-night news program NBC News Overnight, which she wrote and anchored. Overnight was cited by the duPont Columbia Awards as "the best written and most intelligent news program ever." Ellerbee moved to ABC News in 1986 to anchor and write Our World, a weekly primetime historical series. Her work on Our World won her an Emmy.
Ellerbee and partner Rolfe Tessem quit network news in 1987 to start Lucky Duck Productions, a New York-based company that produces news, documentaries, and other specials for broadcast and cable. In 1991, Lucky Duck began producing Nick News for Nickelodeon with Ellerbee as executive producer, writer, and anchor. Now celebrating its 20th year, Nick News, the longest running children's news program in television history, is watched by more children than every other television news show put together—and has earned honors traditionally associated with adult programming. Known for the respectful and direct way it speaks to children about the important issues of our time, Nick News has collected three Peabody Awards (including one personal Peabody given to Ellerbee for her coverage of the Clinton investigation), a duPont Columbia Award, and eight Emmys. In 2009, Nick News received the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best Network News Documentary, making history as the first ever kids' television program to receive this prestigious award.
These days, Ellerbee and her work can be seen all over the television universe. Lucky Duck produces primetime specials for ABC, CBS, HBO, PBS, Lifetime, MTV, Logo, A&E, MSNBC, SOAPnet, Trio, Animal Planet, and TV Land, among others. Ellerbee was honored with an Emmy in 2004 for her series When I Was a Girl, which aired on WE: Women's Entertainment network.
Ellerbee's first foray into books for kids, an eight-part fiction series entitled Get Real published in 2000, won her raves among middle school readers. Both of Ellerbee's previous adult books – And So It Goes, a humorous look at television news, and Move On, stories about being a working single mother, a child of the '60s, and a woman trying to find balance in her life – have been national bestsellers. Ellerbee's recent book, also a bestseller, Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the World and Across the Table, is a humorous account of her love of travel, talking to (and eating with) strangers, and, according to Ellerbee, "oh, just making trouble in general."
In 2011, Ellerbee won the Tribute Award, the highest honor given by the Alliance for Women in Media. On presenting the award, former CNN anchor Aaron Brown said to a ballroom full of women, "The two most important women in the history of television news are Barbara Walters and Linda Ellerbee. Barbara Walters made it possible for you to be on television news; Linda Ellerbee made it possible for you to be YOU on television news."
As a popular and versatile speaker, Ellerbee travels thousands of miles each year, inspiring audiences with her insight and filling banquet rooms and concert halls with laughter. They come to hear her trademark wit and wisdom on everything from how to survive corporate America with your values intact to how to survive breast cancer and live to laugh about it (she often speaks to medical groups concerning healthcare from a patient's point of view), and how to accept – even embrace – a changing world, perhaps making a few changes yourself.
Topics
How to Succeed & Still Hang Onto Your Values
In this speech, Linda Ellerbee shares how to build a strong career by doing it your way; how to find your own power; how to not lose yourself or your values as you rise in your work; how you can (and cannot) balance work and family; and how you can manage to stay human by managing a company humanely. She delivers a series of useful messages to employers and employees through plenty of humor and stories—from having a boss to being the boss. What she offers is nothing less than a new template for a new century of working women and men.
Change Is a Form of Hope
Linda Ellerbee uses her well-known wit and her personal stories to send a strong message that change, life's only constant, need not be met with fear, that to risk change is to believe in tomorrow, and that you can indeed survive a changing world with your heart intact. She's survived the trials of being one of the first women in her field, working for years in corporate America, raising two kids as a single mother, starting her own company, losing both her breasts to cancer, and overcoming her own pig-headedness (something she still has to work at). She shares her personal rules for surviving change, inspiring women (and men) to be strong, encouraging them to make noise, and urging them to do the right thing. In her extraordinary life and career, Ellerbee has learned that change is the norm, and that it's better to make it than be caught by it.
Healthcare from the Patient’s Perspective
Ellerbee shares personal accounts of her experiences with breast cancer – from doing research, asking questions and taking part in making decisions about her own health care as an empowered consumer, to the determination and spirit that have made her a survivor for over 15 years, while acknowledging how important caregivers and health care providers were to her recovery.
How to Survive a Changing World & How to Change Your World
Ellerbee gives her rules for surviving a changing world with the heart intact – from surviving breast cancer to climbing mountains, from overcoming obstacles to making a noise. In her life and in her career, Ellerbee has learned that change is the norm.
Adventures in Journalism
From newspapers to networks, she's gone from covering fires and parades to presidential debates and international terrorism, and collected some of the most prestigious awards along the way. Ellerbee talks about her experience as a veteran journalist.
How to Raise Media-Savvy Kids
In the future, our kids will either learn to use the media that surround them as tools, or they will be tools of that media. Television, the Internet, iPhones – what's next? And what is media literacy today, and how do we teach it? Ellerbee offers insight and perspective gained from speaking with (and listening to) kids for nearly 20 years on the critically acclaimed children's television series, Nick News, and from raising two media-savvy kids of her own.
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