Hoda Kotb has been tabbed as Matt Lauer’s replacement permanently for The Today Show.
She will now be the co-host of the show alongside Savannah Guthrie. “There’s no one I’d rather be sitting next to in 2018 than you,” Kotb said. “This has to be the most popular decision NBC News has ever made,” Guthrie said.
Here are seven things to know about Hoda Kotb:
- She is from Norman, Oklahoma, but grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia and Alexandria, Virginia.
- Kotb lived in Egypt for a year and she is also of Coptic ancestry, both from Lower and Upper Egypt.
- She got her first on-air job with WXVT in Greenville, Mississippi, serving as an anchor and reporter from 1992 to 1998.
- In 1998, she was tabbed by NBC to work as a national news correspondent, while also serving as a Dateline NBC contributing anchor and correspondent starting on that year.
- Kotb wrote a New York Times Bestselling book titled Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer, and Kathie Lee.
- She has been in various other shows besides The Today Show, including Your Total Health, a weekly syndicated show, and the Today fourth our co-host with Kathie Lee Gifford.
- Since January 2015, she announced that she had been in a relationship with New York financier Joel Schiffman for two years. She also adopted a baby girl named Haley Joy Kotb on February 2017.
What do you think of the hiring?
