See You in the Morning

When Robin Meade began in the news business, she wanted so badly to be taken seriously that she succumbed to the advice of image consultants.

“Like there was a perfect prescription for news anchors…,” says Meade, the host of Morning Express with Robin Meade, which airs live on HLN weekdays from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. ET.

By the time they got through with her, she says, “I was 26, but I looked 46. I was a stuffed shirt, voice-of-God type of anchor.” She started experiencing panic attacks, “because I was trying to be perfect.”

Meade eventually peeled herself out of that mold. In her 2009 book, Morning Sunshine! How to Radiate Confidence and Feel It Too, she describes finding her “authentic self,” which looks to be an extrovert. She delivers the news with candid exuberance, punctuated by her robust laugh and playful side commentary.

Combine that with her big hair, form-fitting outfits and stiletto heels, and she brings to mind a brunette Dolly Parton. But maybe that’s because Meade, a former Miss Ohio, originally aspired to be a country music star.

Her minister father dissuaded her from that goal (she still managed to release two albums), but she has no regrets. This fall she marks her 15th year at Morning Express, which makes her the longest-running female host of any morning TV news program. The only morning anchor who’s served longer is Matt Lauer of NBC’s Today.

“Do you believe that?” she chuckles in a phone interview, minutes after wrapping her program. “I feel grateful that I’ve become part of people’s morning news habits.”

Not that it’s easy catering to the cereal crowd. While her husband of 22 years remains asleep, Meade starts her workday at 3 a.m., clicking on the TV monitor in the bathroom to get up to speed on any breaking news and catch any potentially useful video clips.

“Can I get that sound bite?” she’ll query her production crew once she arrives at her studio in Atlanta, where she helms her show without a coanchor but with the support of a meteorologist, financial reporter and sports commentator.

She partly attributes her staying power to her grasp of her viewers.

“I know what people have time for and what they can stomach at that time of day,” says Meade, who won a regional Emmy Award in 1995 for her reporting on a fatal school bus collision in Illinois. At the time, she was working for an NBC affiliate. Her all-time favorite news story was when she parachuted out of an airplane with President George H.W. Bush on his 85th birthday.

Keeping her program at the right pace includes engaging in good-natured, on-camera banter. As seen on YouTube, when a meteorologist once teased Meade for her voluminous hairstyle, attributing the ‘do to the high humidity, she shot back: “No, I meant my hair to be like that. The bigger the hair, the smaller the butt.”

Of her success, Meade observes: “It took a long time to get there. I thought the audience wouldn’t like me.” She takes her cue these days from a framed slogan hanging on her wall: Well-behaved women rarely make history.

Says Meade: “It’s a license to be myself.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 8, 2016