Willow Bay


Willow Bay is an American television journalist, editor, author, and former model. In 2017, she became Dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism having earlier served as Director of USC Annenberg School of Journalism. She was previously a Senior Editor for the Huffington Post, and a Special Correspondent for Bloomberg Television.

Life and career

Bay was born in New York City, New York. She attended Dominican Academy, an all-girls Catholic school in New York, and graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. She attended the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate, and earned her MBA from the Stern School of Business at New York University.
A former fashion model, she was represented by Ford Models. She was a spokesperson for Estée Lauder cosmetics from 1983 to 1989.
Bay served as a correspondent for NBC's Today Show. She was a co-anchor of ABC's Good Morning America Sunday for four years, and a correspondent for ABC's World News Saturday and World News Sunday. From 1991 to 1998, she was co-host with Ahmad Rashād of NBA Inside Stuff.
She was an anchor for CNN, hosting two primetime programs: CNN & Entertainment Weekly and CNN & Fortune, along with CNN’s flagship financial news program, Moneyline. She was a freelance anchor and correspondent for MSNBC and NBC News in 2005 and 2006. She was the executive producer and host of Lifetime Television's Spotlight 25.
Bay is the author of a book titled Talking to Your Kids in Tough Times: How to Answer Your Child's Questions About the World We Live In.
At the Huffington Post, Bay served as a Senior Editor based in Los Angeles. She has helped manage the expansion of non-political content and new verticals for the site. In collaboration with Yahoo! News and the Huffington Post, she interviewed Warren Buffett and President Bill Clinton for the Newsmaker series.

Personal life

Bay has two sons and two step-daughters with her husband, Bob Iger, the current Chairman and former CEO of the Walt Disney Company, whom she married in 1995, following his divorce in 1994.