Gerri Willis serves as an inspiration. An on-air reporter for Fox Business Network and a breast cancer survivor, she talks about her fight against the disease with incredible positivity. “Once I embraced the diagnosis and started working for a good outcome,” Willis says, “it was a life-affirming experience. I started appreciating everything around me.”
Willis learned of her condition in 2016 and is doing well at present, happy to be back on her beloved business beat. Covering politics may be flashier, but Willis believes that economic forces are what truly change lives. She learned as much while working as a journalist in the 1980s, in a small Ohio town with a big Ford Motors plant that started laying people off. “The Ford plant had more to do with the welfare of the town than the mayor did,” she realized. Willis then dedicated her career to “covering the economy — issues that determine the food people could put on the table, how the kids would be raised, whether they would go to college.”
“The headlines are fast and furious, and the topics are complicated — most political issues are infused with economic ones.”
The North Carolina native, who now resides in Hartsdale, and cites gardening and cooking as her favorite ways to unwind, has worked around the country in “every medium imaginable.” Today, she says, staying ahead of the accelerated news cycle is no easy task: “The headlines are fast and furious, and the topics are complicated — most political issues are infused with economic ones.”
As a veteran reporter, Willis is always thinking about the next big story. “There’s so much news breaking right now,” she says, “it’s actually a lot of fun.”
