Andrea Koppel Forges a Name for Herself

“Ted Koppel’s daughter.” For nearly as long as Andrea Koppel can remember, she has been introduced that way.

And six months at the ABC affiliate WJZ-TV here hasn’t changed that, the 25-year-old reporter learned while covering a recent Chinese student rally.

“Ted Koppel’s daughter?” an incredulous student asked, a tone of reverence creeping into his voice. Despite slowly carving out her own niche here, she once again had found herself relegated to the “daughter of” status.

“It’s interesting to be Ted Koppel’s daughter, but that’s not all I’m about,” she said after the rally. “I’d like to be known as my own person.”

Then, mocking a newsman’s enunciated baritone, she quipped: “But they expect me to act like Ted Koppel’s daughter.”

And how does Ted Koppel’s daughter act?

Just like everybody else, say friends and employers. They describe her as down-to-earth, enthusiastic, bright and curious. She is willing to pay her dues, they say, and wants to avoid capitalizing on a last name that spells respectability in TV news circles. In essence, her actions seem to say: No preferential treatment required.

Sounding more like a proud father than a hard-nosed “Nightline” host, Ted Koppel says, “Quite frankly I’m a biased viewer, but I think she’s coming along very well.”

Natalea Brown, news director of WJZ-TV, acknowledges, however, that if Andrea Koppel’s last name had been Smith, the young reporter with less than three years’ experience in radio news probably wouldn’t have been granted an interview.

“You do have the advantage in interviews,” Andrea Koppel concedes. “But when you get the job you have to prove yourself.”

Proving herself at WJZ has meant demonstrating enthusiasm and innovation more often than the no-nonsense style of her father.

It was during one of Koppel’s first telecasts that Brown knew the young former radio reporter had the affable style to make it in local television. As the season’s first snowstorm loomed, she was teased by colleagues about covering the event, which inevitably would find her on the 41st Street bridge--a rite of passage for WJZ’s newest reporter. But Koppel showed up on the bridge, and on the air, seated at a breakfast table she had set up, eating croissants and drinking coffee amid falling snowflakes.

“I was totally surprised,” Brown recalled. “It showed a lot of creativity and humor and a lot of moxie for someone who was there only three weeks. After that I knew she was not a miniature version of her dad.”

Originally hired as a reporter for the 4 a.m.-to-noon shift, where most of her work airs on the noon telecast, she sometimes finagles assignments that keep her working until 5 or 6 p.m.

“The words of advice I most often give Andrea are ‘go home,’ ” Brown says.

Koppel recently began working the 10 a.m.-to-6 p.m. slot, but being one of the least-senior members of the staff means that her schedule can change as quickly as the evening’s newscast.

They are tiring days, but productive ones, she says. There is less time to sleep, listen to favorite performers like Elvis Costello, and run her requisite 4 miles a day.

Her zeal has not kept her from making mistakes, such as missing her deadline on a news story in which a man had barricaded his dead wife and frightened neighbors in an apartment. It was supposed to open the 6 p.m. broadcast, but Koppel was three minutes late editing the segment. The delay meant the difference between getting prime placement and being buried in the newscast.

While there have been gaffes, there also have been successes. Brown lauds Koppel’s coverage of a recent house fire, where she managed to convey the story through two shots: one of the mantle, where family portraits lay among the rubble, and another of the family dog, who, unharmed, wagged his tail in the charred kitchen.

If it means sitting in the Batmobile, hopping across lily pads at the zoo or befriending a dog that sits in a golf cart, she comes back to the station with the goods. It’s all in a day’s work.

Her father sees these light news stories as good experience for his daughter, whom he describes as a “real rookie.”

“If you can handle those dumb feature stories with any dignity, then you can handle others later on,” he said.

For much of her life, she, her three younger siblings and her mother, a lawyer, followed their journalist father from New York to Egypt to points around the globe. Despite seeing the thrills of journalism firsthand, Koppel never thought of pursuing a career in television news.

“I didn’t want people thinking I was just doing it because of my dad. I almost convinced myself it (wasn’t) a possibility because of him.”

She attended high school in Bethesda, Md., where she was the editorial page editor of the student newspaper. After graduating in 1981, she went on to Middlebury College, where she majored in political science with a concentration in Chinese, a love she developed while in Hong Kong (she also is fluent in French). While attending college, she spent part of her junior year in Taiwan and was hired as a translator for ABC News during President Reagan’s trip to China. She spent several summers working for the network as a videotape editor and assignment desk assistant. By graduation in 1985, she was directing the student radio station.

After getting her degree, she accepted a position with an American trade and finance company in Beijing. Enticed by the adventures of foreign correspondents she met, she returned home six months later to pursue a career in broadcast journalism.

“My first reaction was to warn her not to get involved in this business if what she was after was fame and money,” Ted Koppel says.

In 1986, Ted Koppel called the general manager of WTOP-AM in Washington to ask that his daughter be interviewed.

Holland Cooke, the radio station’s operations manager, recalls saying to Andrea: “There’s rough sledding ahead. This isn’t normal living. Don’t make plans for Christmas, and don’t make plans for Easter or the Fourth of July.

“She was nodding her head the whole time and saying, ‘You bet.’ ”

Lack of experience, however, prevented her from landing the job. Six months later, after working for WLTR in Columbia, S.C., she interviewed again with WTOP, where she ended up working for 22 months as a radio reporter, editor and anchor.

Ready for a new challenge, she began sending her resume to local TV stations. Although Koppel thought the initial interview with WJZ-TV was a failure, Brown was contemplating taking a chance on a young reporter with no real TV experience. Near Christmas, Koppel got the job.

“I’m very lucky. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing,” she says. “For now I just want to be the best reporter I can be.”