Hoda Kotb

Hoda Kotb spent ten years as a Dateline NBC correspondent, and was still one when daytime television began making her a household name. Born in Norman, Oklahoma in 1964 to Egyptian parents, and a citizen of both countries, she took a broadcast journalism degree at Virginia Tech in 1986 and climbed through local newsrooms in Mississippi, Illinois, Florida and New Orleans, staying six years at WWL. She joined the fourth hour of Today in 2007, sat next to Kathie Lee Gifford from 2008 and later Jenna Bush Hager, then in 2018 became co-anchor of the main programme alongside Savannah Guthrie, stepping down in January 2025. She speaks publicly about her 2007 breast cancer treatment and about adopting her two daughters. I Really Needed This Today, which Putnam published in 2019, grew out of quotations she had been posting on Instagram; so many people replied with that exact phrase that it became the title of a book of 365 sayings, each with a short note of her own on the people and turns of life behind it.