Cheryl Elias

Cheryl Ann Elias, news anchor and reporter at KYW Newsradio, is an award-winning career broadcast journalist with extensive network and major market experience in radio and TV.

A graduate of Chestnut Hill College with a degree in English literature and philosophy, Cheryl was interested in becoming an anthropologist.

She traveled the world for a couple of years and spent months studying tribal life and doing nature photography in East Africa before coming home to do some graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania.

A short while later Cheryl landed an executive producer’s job at Philadelphia’s TV 29 for a weekly public affairs program.

Elias has written for Charles Osgood of CBS News, covered city hall politics for WNBC Radio in New York, and anchored for all-news WCBS in New York and the RKO Radio Network.

Philadelphia residents will remember her voice as midday anchor on WCAU Radio News during the 1970s.

She co-anchored morning news for WTOP in Washington, DC, anchored a midday magazine program there, and has served as the New Haven bureau chief for WFSB-TV in Hartford, Connecticut.

It was during her time in New York that she gave birth to her son, Michael.

Cheryl has also spent a few years working with battered women and children, the homeless mentally ill, and the chronic mentally ill in South Jersey. She returned to the profession she loves when she joined KYW Newsradio in 1996 as a news reporter and anchor.

Cheryl grew up in Greensburg, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where her mom performed in local theatre productions and her salesman dad dabbled in show business himself, writing lyrics and music for songs recorded in the 1950s by Patti Paige and The Four Aces.

Cheryl was born a talker. Her mother says she began spouting full sentences at the tender age of nine months. And radio stations were her early playgrounds as her song-writing dad would cart her in one arm, and demo records in the other, into their studios.

At the age of three Cheryl began ballet lessons and continued her training with local teachers and then at the Pittsburgh Playhouse School of The Theatre for the next sixteen years.

She has won media awards for her news writing and reporting in New York and Pennsylvania, including the prestigious “Sandy Starobin” Award from the Pennsylvania Associated Press for enterprise reporting. She has covered everything from pancake breakfasts to presidential inaugurals to the marriage of Prince Charles and the late Princess Diana.

She has lectured to various groups about her career and life, and has written two books.

Cheryl says she is interested in so many things that one lifetime isn’t enough to “cover” them all. She enjoys nature, photography, architectural design, reading, decorating, music (especially Mozart and Bob Seeger), art, meditation, comparative religion, and alternative medicine. She considers her family and friends to be her greatest gifts.