Diana Williams - News Anchor, Timeline and Family

Diana hails from the small town of Durham, North Carolina, where she finished her high school and eventually attended college at Duke University to obtain a graduate degree in economics.

She was always drawn to journalism and the first job she bagged after her course was that of an intern reporter at the local news channel, WTVD, in Durham.

She saw the beginning of her television journalism career in Charlotte, North Carolina at the station WSOC-TV where she joined as a reporter. From WSOC-TV, Diana made a parallel move to another channel in Charlotte, WBTV, prior to 1987.

After a modest start in small town TV network, Diana started applying for positions in major cities around the country. She secured her first break into big league of television when she got a call from WNEV-TV (currently known as WHDH), Boston. She worked at the station from 1987 till 1991. In 1991, she landed a news reporter’s job – a position at world’s economic capital, New York. Diana started at WABC as a reporter and was eventually promoted to weekend news anchor. The opportunity provided Diana the boost that she had been craving for long and within a year of joining the network, she started co-anchoring the network’s 11 pm newscast, ‘Eyewitness News’ with Bill Beutel. Till 1999, she continued reporting and co-anchoring Eyewitness News and started co-anchoring the 6 pm newscast with Beutel as well. This was a significant move as since 1986, after the departure of his co-host Roger Grimsby, Bill had been anchoring the newscast solo.

After Bill Beutel’s retirement, Diana started co-anchoring the newscasts with Bill Rattner. She also joined Roz Abrams in 2003 to co-anchor the 5 pm newscast. She was later joined in by Sade Baderinwa instead of Roz, and they have been co-anchoring the 5 pm news hour since then. She also began doing a Sunday morning exclusive titled ‘Eyewitness News Up Close with Diana Williams’, which airs every Sunday at 11 am and is a public-affairs program.

Diana has never been satisfied just to fill the role of the anchor-woman of a prime time news hour. She has also avidly pursued her journalistic passions by travelling all around the world to cover stories of varied interests. She has travelled to countries like Ireland to cover the political troubles in Northern Ireland specifically. She has also travelled to New Mexico to report on illegal immigration across US-Mexico border. She travelled exclusively in the company of Pope John Paul II, especially to cover his visit to Israel and to various parts of the US.

She also covered the September 11th attacks on World Trade Center in New York back in 2001. Diana has also closely followed the Mayoral elections of New York through several cycles and interviewed personalities like Rudi Giuliani, Hilary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg and Ed Koch.

Diana has authored a number of books. Noteworthy among them are ‘Race, Ethnicity, and Crime: Alternate Perspectives’ and ‘Crime and Security in Trinidad and Tobago’.

Diana has also received a number of prestigious awards for her journalistic works. Noteworthy among which is an Emmy Award for the half-hour special called ‘Dangerous Crossings’ focusing on illegal immigration issues across Mexican-Arizona borders.

Apart from being a successful journalist and TV anchor, Diana has excelled in the role of a wife and mother. She resides with her family in the Westchester County of New York State. She is an avid outdoorsman, loves to play tennis and going for long hikes in lesser known trails. She has also done fair amount of mountaineering and even has the honor of climbing some of the highest mountain peaks of the world like Mt. Kilimanjaro, Mount Fuji, Mount Rainer and Pike’s Peak.

She has been the rock of the family and has extended immense support to her husband, Douglas, through his rigorous battle against Kidney problems and his painful stem cell transplant. The family was again subjected to more trauma when her son Nathaniel, a pilot with the US Air Force, met with a near fatal road accident in Panama City in 2015. She took a long leave of absence from work during this time and dedicated all her time to help her son recover. Nathaniel eventually recovered from the grave injuries and is doing pretty well currently.