Paula Zahn
American journalist and anchor for four major news networks.
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Paula Ann Zahn, born February 24, 1956, is an American journalist and newscaster. She has served as an anchor for ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, and CNN. Today, she produces and hosts the true crime series On the Case with Paula Zahn on Investigation Discovery.
Early life and career
Paula Zahn was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Her mother worked as a schoolteacher and artist, while her father was an IBM sales executive. She spent her early years in Canton, Ohio, with her parents and three siblings. The family later moved to Naperville, Illinois, due to her father's job; she joked that "IBM" meant "I've been moved." Zahn attended Washington Junior High School and graduated from Naperville Central High School in 1974.
She competed in beauty pageants, making the semi-finals of the 1973 Miss Teenage America Pageant. A cello scholarship took her to Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, where she interned at WBBM-TV in Chicago and earned a journalism degree in 1978. Over the next decade, she worked at local stations in Dallas, San Diego, Houston, Boston, and Los Angeles.
National career
In 1987, Zahn joined ABC News, anchoring The Health Show and later co-anchoring World News This Morning, as well as anchoring news segments on Good Morning America. She moved to CBS News on February 26, 1990, co-anchoring CBS This Morning with Harry Smith. She covered the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville, France, with Tim McCarver and the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway, and reported on the Waco siege. After leaving the morning show on June 14, 1996, she anchored the Saturday edition of the CBS Evening News, substituted for Dan Rather, and contributed to 48 Hours, Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel, and CBS News Sunday Morning.
In 1999, she joined Fox News Channel, anchoring Fox Report and later launching The Edge with Paula Zahn. On September 11, 2001, she began at CNN, joining Aaron Brown in covering the terrorist attacks. During the Iraq War in 2003, she moved to prime time with Live from the Headlines, and by September her show Paula Zahn Now premiered. She resigned from CNN on July 24, 2007, and the final broadcast aired August 2, 2007.
Personal life
Paula Zahn and her then-husband, real estate developer Richard Cohen, raised their three children in the Jewish faith. In 2004, the couple made headlines after the nest of the famous red-tailed hawk Pale Male was taken down from their Manhattan co-op building, a move Cohen backed. Zahn announced her divorce from Cohen in April 2007 after two decades of marriage. That same year, she sued him, claiming he mishandled her earnings from their marriage; a New York court dismissed the case as a matrimonial dispute in disguise.
In 1992, Zahn performed as a cellist at Carnegie Hall with the New York Pops. She serves as an honorary board member of the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation and is a vocal advocate for cancer awareness, especially breast cancer. Dowling College awarded her an honorary degree in May 2003.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Paula Zahn (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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