Linda Ellerbee (born Linda Jane Smith in Bryan, Texas, USA, August 15, 1944) is an outspoken award-winning journalist who is most famously known for several jobs at NBC News, including Washington (DC) correspondent, and reporter and co-anchor of NBC News Overnight, which was recognized by the duPont Columbia Awards as "the best written and most intelligent news program ever." She has also served as a reporter for the morning television programs The Today Show and Good Morning America. In 1986, she moved to ABC News, where she co-wrote and co-anchored "Our World", a weekly primetime historical series. Her work on that program won her an Emmy.
In 1987, Ellerbee and her life and business partner Rolfe Tessem left network news to start their own production company, Lucky Duck Productions. The company has produced programs for every major cable network, and has as its flagship program Nick News, a news program for children on Nickelodeon. That show has received many awards: three Peabody Awards (including one personal Peabody given to Ellerbee for her coverage of the Clinton investigation), another duPont Columbia Award and three Emmys. In 2004, Ellerbee was honored with an Emmy for her WE: Women's Entertainment network series "When I Was a Girl".
Ellerbee had become overweight in the 1980s, and lost over 50 pounds (23 kg) in the mid-1990s in a highly-publicized healthy-eating regimen. She also survived breast cancer around the same time.
Her autobiography And So It Goes was published in 1986. A second book of memoirs, "Move on: Adventures in the Real World" was published in 1992 and third, "Take Big Bites: Adventures Around the World and Across the Table" in 2005. In addition, she has authored an eight-part series "Girl Reporter" books for young people, as well as a syndicated newspaper column.
According to The Book of Lists: The 90's Edition, Ellerbee acknowledged publicly that she'd had an abortion.
