Ann Curry is the quick-change artist of national news, and she’s proud of it. As an NBC anchor fixture, she switches roles from Today to Dateline to NBC Nightly News, at times working all three desks in the span of a single day. The 52-year-old dynamo manages to sidle up to Matt Lauer, Meredith Viera and Al Roker on a morning-show couch brimming with the usual jocular banter and, within hours, earnestly question a gamut of VIP interviewees in a traditional newsroom—everyone from Brad Pitt to the late Benazir Bhutto, assassinated prime minister of Pakistan.
More impressive in today’s up-to-the-nanosecond news environment, she draws a line for herself between entertainment and news—easy enough to do when covering for Brian Williams; less so on Today, where workplace fashion and Hollywood scandal hold sway over updates on the war in Iraq during a marathon four hours of chatter. What might appear to be an up-for-anything attitude alongside Matt Lauer is actually calculated coverage. Curry climbed Kilimanjaro to document its vanishing snows, a visible marker of climate change. She jumped out of an airplane to celebrate the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary and its dedicated servicemen. As a morning co-anchor, it’s Curry’s combination of physical fearlessness and hard fact that makes a compelling breakfast story. “When things mean something, when they matter, I think a risk can be worth it,” she says.
Off camera, Curry is kinder, smarter, more adventurous and more driven than she appears on set. A daughter of two cultures whose Japanese mother doesn’t get her American father’s jokes, she’s a mother of two who Tweets about atrocities in Angola, and a sibling who has suffered a sister’s bout with breast cancer and a brother’s death in the line of duty as a U.S. serviceman. Assignments to cover Kosovo have come while shopping for her daughter’s Easter dress. And maybe because these human moments inform her work, viewers across America—whether moms returning from the school-bus stop or taxi passengers obsessively eyeing the ticker—think she’s sweet and are willing to lend her an ear.
We are willing, too, so the Flyer recently caught up Curry at 30 Rock.
You’re the primary cover for Brian Williams on NBC’s Nightly News, but can you hold your own with him joke-wise? He’s proved himself pretty funny on Saturday Night Live, but you’ve done stand-up at Carolines’s Comedy Hour.
It was scary to do stand-up. People who are professional comics told me, “You are brave.” You’re up there in front of all these people, and you’re not trying to speak to them, which I’m used to, but you’re trying to make them laugh.
Most of your material was about your mixed heritage. Have you always found it funny?
I always found my mixed heritage extremely painful. People have made fun of me, I’ve had racist comments, and I’ve been called a Jap. It’s an interesting thing in life—those things that you’re forced to feel ashamed of or insecure about are often your greatest strengths.
Is it that empathy that makes generally private people willing to sit down with you?
We live in a time when journalists are not only challenged by the fact that our industry is going through an identity crisis, but also by the fact that not all journalists are perceived as being worthy of the job. Whether that’s true or not is debatable. What’s not debatable is that a lot of Americans and people around the world are cynical about what we do and our motivations. So if you can be a journalist who has a reputation for fairness—that there is a human being behind the pen and pad—that helps.
You’ve spent several days in Africa with former First Lady Laura Bush. Do you consider yourself a humanitarian?
Journalism is an act of faith in the future. I’m interested in unleashing the goodness that I believe exists in people. The stories we’ve done in Kosovo, Congo, Darfur, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran have meant more to me than anything else I’ve done professionally, because I know that these [are stories] that people didn’t know already. We’ve transformed the way people think by doing them.
Do you think postings on new media such as Twitter and blogs have helped or hurt news reporting?
I’m excited about the possibility that there’s going to be more ways to report information. The real question online is who’s going to be able to pay for the more expensive ways to report—for example, investigative reporting, foreign coverage, war coverage. Will we transition? Absolutely. But, again, how do you pay for it? That’s the part we still haven’t figured out.
What would people be most surprised to find out about you?
Some people see me as the Today Show person who’s laughing. People ask me, why do you travel, why do you risk yourself? I have a big cushy anchor job, and I get to be on TV. The truth is, I do these big cushy anchor jobs so that I can do [humanitarian journalism], which, at the end of my life, will mean the most. My goals have always been to be a foreign correspondent and work on stories that I care about. And along the way I became an anchor.
You’re a bit of a photojournalist, even capturing images during a recent visit to Africa alongside celebrity activist George Clooney that you exhibited at the Washington School of Photography.
Photojournalism became a passion that I put on the back burner until the night before I went to Darfur. Before I got on a plane, I went to the biggest photo store in Manhattan and bought a Nikon D2X, which was at the time a premiere war-zone camera. So I bought this monster camera and headed to Darfur.
You work in words as an anchor. Is a picture really worth a thousand of them?
Good photographs can make you stop and instantly feel and think things that take far longer for the written word to make you experience. If I can marry words and images, there’s something that is powerful.
Do you embark on your Today Show physical adventures because of a need to balance out the emotional assignments?
I don’t have many physical fears. I don’t jump out of planes without reason, but I will jump out of a plane to mark the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, and the guy I’m jumping in tandem with has jumped 6,438 times, and he’s as strong as an ox and as confident and as capable as anyone on the planet. A calculated risk—that’s how I live. When I climbed Kilimanjaro, the effort was to talk about the world and global warming, and Kilimanjaro is a classic example of how [the planet] is changing. When I’m convinced that something might be useful, I’ll do it.
Are you ever afraid?
Every day you work in journalism, you’re asking, sometimes every other minute, “Am I getting this right?” Is this the right verb; is this the right word? You’re questioning right up until the time you’re reporting. There’s always a way to make things truer. You get the opportunity to talk to millions of people about a story that matters; you are awake and focused, and you’re struggling to make sure that you don’t drop the ball.
In the days leading up to a trip to a place where it may be a little gnarly, I’m not worried about me, but I’m worried about my kids. There’s no excuse if you get hurt or maimed, or worse. But once I’m on the plane, I don’t waste a moment thinking about whether I should be there—I’m committed. My only focus is to keep everyone safe and get the story. It’s just the thinking about it beforehand. That’s the time when I get scared.
What’s the most nervous you’ve been about getting it right?
Omar al-Bashir, president of Sudan—the man accused of war crimes, genocide in Darfur, enabling 1,500 villages to burn—and sitting right across from him with a short amount of time to ask questions.
How do you keep your sanity and emotional distance while reporting on heart-tugging stories?
I’m not sane, and I’m not distant. To be a reporter in the way that I wish to be, you need to be a physical, emotional and mental athlete. You have to find your way of handling it so that you can go into the same situation the next time not being distant—eyes, heart and body wide open. Otherwise you can’t report in a way that will be useful. And then you have to make sure you take care of yourself so that you can do it again.