29 Year Old Reporter Soledad O'Brien on MSNBC's 'The Site'

Here is a clip from the MSNBC program The Site from 1996 when Soledad O'Brien was the host. The show was about the new Internet and technology and MSNBC was then a very different kind of cable channel.

The Site was an hour-long TV program that debuted in July 1996 with MSNBC's launch and aired Monday through Saturday, reaching 35 million homes. The Site morphed into an entire technology channel called ZDTV, which was later renamed TechTV, and which merged to become G4.

Soledad closes out this episode with the virtual character Dev Null (voiced by Leo Laporte) singing  "Happy Together" accompanied by Andy Cahan, the keyboardist from the band that recorded that hit, The Turtles.



Soledad had anchored MSNBC's award-winning technology program The Site and also the MSNBC weekend morning show.

The Site was preempted for two weeks by news programs during the death of Diana, Princess of Wales during September 1997. That programming was very popular and changed MSNBC's approach to programming.  It was never brought back, and so the show ended without a finale.

Fans petitioned MSNBC to bring it back without success. A version of it was reincarnated, with laporte but without Soledad,  as The Screen Savers in May 1998.

Soledad had joined NBC News in 1991 and was based in New York as a field producer for Nightly News and Today. After The Site, she anchored NBC's Weekend Today starting in July 1999.

Soledad O'Brien and Long Form Documentaries for CNN

CNN's Soledad O'Brien tells Media Beat that she travels to New Orleans around 25 times a year. Recently, many of those trips were for production on New Orleans Rising the latest documentary she completed for CNN's In America unit which debuts August 21 at 8pmET.

Soledad, who focuses on long form documentaries for CNN now, says her unit is now working on six documentaries at a time and, while the first "In America" projects initially focused on race, she thinks "the direction is to go wider and broader."




In Part 2 of the video, O'Brien discusses her family, career, and the changes that have taken place in CNN's primetime line-up and in Part 3, she talks about her early experiences as a digital technology reporter.

Soledad with David Pogue

One of Soledad's 1997 interviews on The Site was with David Pogue.

He graduated from Yale University in 1985, summa cum laude with Distinction in Music, and spent ten years working in New York as a Broadway musical conductor.

His tech credentials included writing for Macworld Magazine from 1988-2000. His back-page column was called "The Desktop Critic." He started writing tech books with Macs for Dummies as a followup for the publisher of the "...for Dummies" books, whose first DOS for Dummies, launched the still-popular series.

David Pogue continues to write many non-fiction tech books.

In his segments with Soledad, David Pogue showed his musical side with some parody compositions including (click to play) "Don't Cry for Me Cupertino," "Macmaker," and "I Write the Code."

Pogue became the New York Times personal technology writer in 2000. He continues to write columns in print & online and tech guides such as iPhone: The Missing Manual, The World According to Twitter and David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual.

http://www.davidpogue.com

Soledad O'Brien 1997

Take a look at some clips of Soledad O'Brien in 1997 when she was the host of the program about Internet technology, THE SITE.

SoledadOBrien.info