Soledad O'Brien

The broadcast journalist became a household name after covering worldwide disasters, including Hurricane Katrina. Now she’s focused on telling the story of the food crisis that many college students are facing.

- Sophie Brickman

Soledad O’Brien first heard the starfish story in Haiti, when she was reporting on the unimaginable devastation of the 2010 earthquake. Walking down a beach strewn with starfish dying in the sun, a man comes upon a boy throwing them back into the water, one at a time. When he points out that there are too many starfish, that it doesn’t matter because he’ll never save them all, the boy shrugs and replies, “It matters to the one.”

In many ways, the parable represents O’Brien’s career. She built her reputation by hunting down the stories of individuals and elevating them to the national conversation for a single reason: “Even while you’re telling good stories through individuals, you’re talking about systems,” she says.

Born to immigrant parents—an Australian father and an Afro-Cuban mother—she and her five siblings, all of whom attended Harvard, grew up as one of the few mixed-race families in Smithtown, New York. She was premed but dropped out to start her career at a local Boston television station, where she used her studies to finagle a spot on the medical unit and, as a production assistant, covered the AIDS epidemic. (She later returned to finish her college degree, while pregnant with her first child.) After a stint as a producer with NBC, she went on to become a local reporter and later a correspondent with NBC News. In 2003, she moved to CNN, where she covered national disasters like Hurricane Katrina (for which she won a Peabody) and started the network’s successful documentary franchises Black in America and Latino in America. She eventually rose to run her own production company, fittingly called Starfish Media Group.