Who Is Hoda Kotb? 5 Facts You Need to Know About the Today Show Co-Anchor
She's replacing Matt Lauer on the morning show.
On Tuesday morning, NBC announced it had chosen Hoda Kotb to replace Matt Lauer as co-anchor of the Today show. Kotb is a familiar face to Today viewers, as she has co-anchored the 10 a.m. hour alongside Kathie Lee Gifford for years now.
Though Kotb may have become a household name for drinking wine and having fun with Gifford, she has a solid reputation as a trusted journalist who has covered international news as often as she's opened up about her own life. Here's what you need to know about the Today show's new permanent co-anchor.
She's a seasoned journalist.
Kotb graduated from Virginia Tech with a bachelor's degree in broadcast journalism. She started her career as a broadcaster at CBS news, working as a news assistant in Cairo, Egypt starting in 1986, according to her official NBC bio. In the U.S., she worked as an anchor and reporter for local news stations in Greenville, Mississippi, Moline, Illinois, Fort Myers, Florida, and New Orleans. She then hosted a weekly syndicated series called Your Total Health from 2004 to 2008.
Her reporting has won numerous awards, including a Peabody for her Dateline report, "The Education of Ms. Groves," in 2006. She has been nominated for an Emmy four times, and won one as part of the Today show team in 2010.
She's been with NBC for 20 years.
Kotb first started at NBC News in 1998, as a correspondent for Dateline. She covered Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, which was personal to her as she lived in New Orleans for several years. Other stories she covered included the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, conflicts between the Israelis and Palestinians, and the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. She spoke to Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi in an exclusive interview, which was the first time in 11 years she spoke to an American TV journalist.
Ten years after she arrived at NBC, she was brought on as a cohost of the fourth hour of Today, alongside Kathie Lee Gifford. She will continue that role in her new position. "Nobody is as good as what they do as Hoda. Nobody spreads more joy," Gifford told People. "Everybody universally adores her. She doesn't have a mean bone in her body. She's more loving and kind, so when these wonderful things started happening for this wonderful woman, we were thrilled for her."
She's a cancer survivor.
Kotb has often opened up on the air about her experience with breast cancer. She learned about her diagnosis while talking to an intern at her desk at NBC, and underwent a mastectomy and reconstructive surgery in 2007.
In an essay on Today.com, Kotb wrote about how she'll always live with her cancer scars, and they still bother her from time to time. "You gradually learn to accept your body after cancer. I have always been pretty happy inside," she wrote. "My outsides come and go, whether it's because of gray hairs or scars. All that stuff is going to be there, but I feel if I am comfortable with who I am on the inside, I will always be OK."
She's a new mom.
Kotb's breast cancer treatment adversely affected her fertility, and less than a year after her recovery, she divorced her husband, tennis coach Burzis Kanga. So having a child of her own wasn't necessarily a given, but she told People she would always fantasize about becoming a mom.
"One of the reasons was because I couldn't have children," she said. "Finally I said to myself one day, 'Why can't I? Why not me?' I had this ache in me that I couldn't push away anymore."
This March, at age 52, she adopted her baby daughter, Haley Joy, who was born on Valentine's Day. "I felt like in my life, I've had joy beyond what I've imagined, but this is beyond a dream," she said on the Today show. "I never believed in love at first sight until now."
She lives with her partner, Joel Schiffman.
Kotb has been dating 58-year-old financier Joel Schiffman for more than four years, and the two live together. At first, they kept the relationship under wraps, and she only referred to him as "Boots" on the air, but two years into their relationship, she spilled the beans.
Schiffman wasn't listed as the father on Haley Joy's adoption papers in order to simplify the process, but Kotb has said her little one will call him Dad and the two will raise her together. He has a 23-year-old daughter, Kyle, from a previous marriage.
