Linda Ellerbee has announced her retirement. The veteran newswoman was a model for the title character in the TV sit-com Murphy Brown, wrote a best-selling book about her career in television, and left the news biz to find success in a second career at Nickelodeon, where she ran the Emmy Award-winning youth news program Nick News for 25 years. She was one of the first prominent women in the TV news business — a trailblazer, a pioneer, a visionary. And it all might not have happened for Ellerbee had she not made a major rookie mistake while working the night desk at the Associated Press in Dallas in the early 1970s:
Ellerbee began a television news career after being fired by The Associated Press in 1972. On the night desk in Dallas, she wrote a gossipy letter to a friend that was inadvertently sent on the wire to three states. A news director at Houston’s KHOU-TV saw it, thought Ellerbee was a funny writer, and hired her.
She quickly moved on to local news in New York and then NBC, where she covered politics and co-hosted the prime-time newsmagazine “Weekend” with Lloyd Dobyns. She hosted weekly news segments on the “Today” show and, later, “Good Morning America.”
You can read about Ellerbee’s career in the Houston Chronicle, and Nickelodeon will air a one-hour retrospective of her work on Dec. 15.
(H/T Former D staffer Rod Davis’ Facebook page, where Rod posted an amazing photo of The Ticket‘s Norm Hitzges chatting-up Ellerbee at a party Davis and Hitzges through at their North Dallas house just before the young AP staffer sent her letter out on the wire.)
