Former CNN Kathleen Koch – Episode #44

For 18 years, she was a CNN general assignment correspondent specializing in aviation reporting and serving as correspondent at the Pentagon, the White House and on Capitol Hill.

Kathleen Koch is a Washington-based freelance journalist, author and speaker. Her best-selling book, Rising from Katrina, which traces her Mississippi hometown’s recovery from Hurricane Katrina and her experiences covering it, was released August 1, 2010.

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Koch provided moving reports from the Mississippi Gulf Coast during and in the years following Hurricane Katrina. Her two documentaries on the recovery of her hometown – Saving My Town – The Fight for Bay Saint Louis and The Town That Fought Back – received a New York Festivals Gold Medal. Koch also shared in the 2006 Peabody Award CNN received for its coverage of the hurricane.

Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including three silver and one bronze Telly for a report she anchored for Astrocast.TV on the new Spaceport America under construction in the New Mexico desert. In 2007, Koch won a New York Festivals Gold Medal and a bronze award for investigative reporting from the New York Association of Black Journalists for a CNN report in which she revealed the apparent murder of a young inmate by guards at a Mississippi jail.

In 2004, Koch traveled the country covering the Bush presidential campaign, before being deployed south to Florida to report on the deadly series of hurricanes lashing that state. In 2003, she was part of CNN’s around-the-clock coverage from the Pentagon on the build up to and the launch of the Iraq war. A year earlier, Koch was one of the primary correspondents covering the Washington-D.C-area sniper attacks. In 2001, she was part of CNN’s Emmy award-winning coverage of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Two months later, Koch was lead correspondent on CNN’s coverage of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in New York.

Before joining CNN, Koch was a general assignment reporter covering Washington D.C., for multiple news organizations. She was also a consumer and medical reporter for the Group W Newsfeed Network and a weekend reporter at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C. She was an anchor and State Department correspondent for “America Today,” the U.S. Information Agency’s two-hour daily international news broadcast to Europe. Koch began her television career as a reporter and weekend anchor for the ABC affiliate WLOX-TV in Biloxi, Miss.

Koch was a Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholar at the University of Dijon in Dijon, France. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of Southern Mississippi (USM).

Koch currently serves on the USM School of Mass Communications and Journalism Advisory Board and on Rotary International’s 2010-11 Alumni Advisory Committee.