Heather Hope joins the 8News anchor team in September 2022, co-anchoring alongside Eric Philips and Chief Meteorologist John Bernier in the 8News at 4 newscast.
The Atlanta native has over a decade of journalism experience and comes to Richmond from KFMB-TV in San Diego, where her reporting received an Emmy Award in 2020 for her breaking news coverage of a deadly synagogue shooting in Poway, CA.
She frequently covered immigration stories at the world’s busiest land border crossing in Mexico. She interviewed First Lady Dr. Jill Biden in San Diego while on a presidential campaign stop. Heather’s coverage of the first female Marine recruiting class ever trained on the West Coast earned her an Emmy nomination in 2021.
Heather was previously a reporter at KWTV in Oklahoma City, where in her first three months at the station, she covered two deadly tornados, one of which became the widest tornado on record. She featured the successes and challenges of local public schools in her bi-weekly educational series titled “Beyond the Bell.” Heather was also the first reporter to go on air with a viral racist chant video that led to the takedown of a University of Oklahoma fraternity.
Heather got her start in TV news at KGET in Bakersfield, CA where she wrote, shot and edited her own stories and filled in as anchor. While in the Central Valley, she covered a deadly mass shooting at the Tule Indian Reservation and reported on Allensworth, the first town in California established exclusively by African Americans in 1908.
Heather is a proud alum of both The Ohio State University and the University of Southern California and calls herself a “Buck Trojan.” She graduated from OSU with honors with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and served as a graduate teaching assistant for the campus newspaper, was pictured on the inaugural cover of OSUnity Magazine and co-founded the university’s first chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists.
She received her Master’s degree in broadcast journalism from USC’s Annenberg School, where she hosted a news radio show and shot a documentary for her graduate thesis profiling religious leaders in Los Angeles, and the film was showcased at the California African American Museum.
In her spare time, Heather loves to travel. Both her parents previously worked in the airline industry, and Heather has a had a passport since the age of three and got a taste of international reporting while interning for CBS News in London.
Heather is excited to explore all the beauty that Richmond has to offer.
You can follow her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or drop her an email at hhope@wric.com.
