America's Morning Anchor Started in New Orleans
Hoda Kotb was born in Norman, Oklahoma, in 1964, to Egyptian immigrant parents, but New Orleans is where she became Hoda. She attended St. Martin's Episcopal School and then Tulane University in the mid-1980s, and the city left a mark on her that decades of network television have never erased. She still talks about New Orleans the way people talk about their first love — with a warmth and specificity that goes beyond nostalgia.
The New Orleans Years
After graduating from Tulane with a broadcast journalism degree in 1986, Kotb got her first television job at WWL-TV, Channel 4 — the CBS affiliate that is the most-watched station in the New Orleans market and the one that every aspiring journalist in the city dreamed of working for. She covered local news, learned her craft, and developed the on-camera presence that would eventually make her one of the most recognized faces in American media.
WWL was the training ground. New Orleans was the classroom. Working in a city where stories walk up to you on every corner, where the culture is so rich that even a routine assignment becomes interesting, gave Kotb the storytelling instincts that set her apart from the army of polished, interchangeable anchors that populate American television news.
The Rise
From New Orleans, Kotb moved to stations in Fort Myers, Greenville, and Moline before landing at NBC's "Dateline" in 1998. She covered major stories — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 tsunami — with a combination of journalistic rigor and emotional intelligence that viewers responded to. She was a serious journalist who was also genuinely warm, a combination that television networks search for constantly and almost never find.
In 2007, she joined the fourth hour of the "Today" show alongside Kathie Lee Gifford, and the pairing was magic — loose, funny, wine-drinking, and utterly unlike the buttoned-up formality of traditional morning news. When Kotb was named co-anchor of the flagship "Today" show in 2018, replacing Matt Lauer alongside Savannah Guthrie, it was the culmination of a thirty-year career that began at WWL in New Orleans.
Katrina
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005, Kotb was among the NBC journalists who covered the disaster. For her, it wasn't just a story — it was personal. She wept on air. She talked about the neighborhoods she knew, the restaurants where she'd eaten, the people she'd worked with. Her coverage was visceral and honest in a way that only someone who had lived in New Orleans could deliver, and it resonated with viewers who could see that this journalist wasn't performing grief — she was feeling it.
Forever New Orleans
Kotb has returned to New Orleans repeatedly throughout her career — for Jazz Fest, for special broadcasts, for the simple pleasure of being in a city she loves. She has adopted children, written bestselling books, and become one of the most beloved figures in American television. But ask her about New Orleans and the Tulane girl comes out — the one who fell in love with a city that taught her how to listen, how to connect, and how to tell a story that makes people feel something real.
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