Roxanne Russell
Professorial Lecturer,
Senior Producer, CBS Weekend News

Phone: (202) 994-6227
Fax: (202) 994-5806
E-mail: rrp@cbsnews.com
Office: MPA 425

Expertise

Courses Taught

EMDA/JOUR 147, Television Workshop
EMDA/JOUR 190, Electronic Newsgathering

Selected Works

Background

Roxanne Russell is senior producer of CBS "Weekend News," where she supervises news coverage out of the Washington, D.C. bureau. A producer for CBS since 1983, Russell has worked in various production capacities for the news organization. As a segment producer for the "Evening News," she produced feature-length issues stories for "Eye on America;" she also produced "Washington Notebook" for anchor Bob Schieffer. When she first started with CBS, she covered the Pentagon and national security issues.

Prior to CBS, Russell spent four years in San Francisco as current affairs director for KQED-TV. There she maintained editorial control of news, documentaries, and live studio productions of breaking news. From 1975 to 1979, Russell assembled an all-female production staff to produce "Womantime," a first for public television: a news magazine program devoted to women's issues and changing male and female roles. Russell was producer, writer and reporter for the program, which was later accepted for national syndication under the name "Turnabout." The series won two Northern California Emmys and was cited twice by the National Broadcast Industry Awards and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Prior to that, she was a field producer for NBC News where she produced all coverage of the Patricia Hearst kidnapping.

Some of her other special productions include: "60 Minutes," a cover story profile of General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander-in-chief of Operation Desert Storm; "48 Hours," a segment on AWACS surveillance planes and another on the military and its special operations teams. For "Crossroads" she developed and produced a first-of-its-kind satellite interconnect among California public stations to allow statewide debate of key state issues. The broadcasts included produced segments and live audience participation. She also produced "Cameras in the Court," a broadcast of the first cameras allowed inside the California Supreme Court. That experience led all federal courts to open up to news cameras and won the prestigious Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association.

Among her many accolades, Russell has received four national Emmy Awards while at CBS News; for covering the assassination of Rabin in 1996, for covering the bombing at the Olympics in Atlanta, for day-of-air coverage of the Beirut Bombing, and the first Reagan-Gorbachev summit in 1983.

She has also received The Edgar, a mystery writers award, for her documentary "The Case of Dashiell Hammett"; two George Foster Peabody awards-for "Dashiell Hammett" and "Broken Arrow: Could a Nuclear Weapons Accident Happen Here?" She received a Columbia University Dupont Journalism Award for "Broken Arrow" and "Bad Moon Rising" a documentary on hate groups in California. She won San Francisco State University's Broadcast Industry Award, for journalistic excellence for "Bad Moon Rising, "Dashiell Hammett," "S-M: One Foot Out of the Closet" and others. Russell was also named Broadcaster of the Year by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the Mayor's office.

Education

M.A., Journalism, University of California-Berkeley, 1970
B.A., German, University of California-Berkeley, 1969
University of Goettingen, Germany 1967-1968