On the fifth floor of a nondescript office building on Battery Street, news anchor Juliette Goodrich walks into the KPIX-TV newsroom wearing high heels, bright red pants and a black top, ready to speak to the entire country. She marches over to a massive curved green screen, joking with her cameraman Mat Straub while fielding my questions as the clock ticks down to showtime, decidedly nonplussed about the fact that, in under a minute’s time, she’ll be addressing the nation on “CBS News 24/7,” the network’s online national news show.
“30 seconds is a long time in this business,” she says, continuing to chat until Straub interrupts — “10,” he says, and she’s still joking about checking her texts to see if her mom is watching. Straub says “5,” and she straightens her posture; “3,” eyes straight at the camera; “2,” she’s still as a statue; the “1” is silent; and then she launches into the “A block” of hard news about stories, ranging from a burning apartment building in the Bronx to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony to Congress. Her work has earned her 10 Emmy Awards.
Goodrich was raised in the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton, where she got her start in broadcasting in front of an audience of 300,000 at Tri-Valley Community Television (Channel 30). She still lives there to this day, sending her children to the high school she herself attended. Around the Bay Area, she’s something of a local celebrity — regarding the places where she’s been spotted the most, she cites the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport and Costco (while munching on samples). During the rare moments when she’s not obsessively tuned in to the news, she can be found riding her horse Lucky, which she purchased off Craigslist, of all places, after doing a story on rescue horses.
After attending UC Davis, her path to a network news show in San Francisco went along “the California route,” as she calls it, never leaving the state as she worked her way up from smaller markets like Redding and Chico, then Sacramento…