The Official Soledad O'Brien Fan Club
USA TODAY - TUESDAY, APRIL 1, 1997 - 3D
Fans Connect with O'Brien at ‘The Site’
By Jefferson Graham
USA TODAY
The MSNBC cable channel is staffed by name news star-such as Tom Brokaw and Jane Pauley, but newcomer Soledad O'Brien has her own following.
The host
of The Site, MSNBCs six-nights-a-week show about new
technology, O'Brien receives 250 to 300 e-mails a day and has an
Intemet fan club with 600 members and her own Web site, featuring
family photos and a link to the fan club site, which sells Soledad
coffee mugs. Not too bad for a 30-year-old former NBC News producer
and host of two science shows for the Discovery Channel.
"There's something about this show that seems to touch people," says O'Brien, who also will host an April 8 PBS special, Imaging America. "The thing I never realized about the Net is that you have to interact with people. As a TV reporter, you never have a back-and-forth with people about your stories."
"But people critique me every day. My mother even sent in e-mail complaining that I was rushing guests."
The Site (www.thesite.com), co-produced by NBC News and Ziff-Davis Television, airs Monday through Saturday (7 p.m. ET/4 PT; 1 am. ET/10 p.m. PT; and 4 a.m. ET/ 1 PT). The show dispenses information in a way that O'Brien's mom could understand.
That means fewer product reviews and more pieces about how people use technology, such as a recent story about how to create a Web page.
Tom Ezdebski, president of O'Brien's fan club, says the anchor "has a way of lighting up the screen. It is just a matter of time before she has her own show on NBC. She is the rising star of that network's journalists."
Some highlights from Soledad's Web site: She is married to an investment banker', prefers the Netscape browser to Microsoft's Internet Explorer; and is writing a novel about her black Cuban mom's interracial marriage to her white Australian dad.
She surfs the Net daily for story ideas and says, "We’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg . . . I know that in 10 years, people will be looking back at our shows saying we were so clueless."