Andre Trevigne, who worked as an anchor at New Orleans TV stations WWL, WGNO and WDSU, has died.
Trevigne worked at CBS affiliate WWL in the 1980s until 1992.
“Trevigne was a TV personality without compare, a hard-edged anchor-reporter who paired with Eric Paulsen to redefine morning news in New Orleans,” WWL quotes a 1998 Times-Picayune story. “Eric and Andre were the ‘Moonlighting’ Dave-and-Maddie of TV news, a couple of strong heads whose sometimes pointed on-air exchanges left viewers wondering if they were bantering or battling.”
“It was chemistry, it really was,” Trevigne said in a 2002 interview. “A lot of people think we didn’t like each other but we’re friends to this day. We’re still friends, we’ve always been friends, but I’m not going to sit there and and let him get away with some of the things he did and that’s what the chemistry was.”
Trevigne left WWL in 1992 and endured personal tragedy in 1993 when her son, Morris Smith, was murdered. In 1994, Trevigne joined WDSU-TV as a reporter, then turned her personal tragedy into a crusade to help fight crime and highlight the plight of victims, as host of a crime show on WGNO-TV. She was also the station’s first news anchor when it switched its network affiliation to ABC.
Though she was a New Orleans native, her broadcasting career actually began in Chicago, but in radio, not television.
“I had never done television when I started at Channel 4, and was scared to death,” she said of her early career which began in the late 1970s.