Samantha Chatman has been promoted to weekend morning anchor at Chicago ABC owned station WLS.
Chatman will anchor the weekend morning newscasts with Mark Rivera effective immediately while continuing to cover consumer investigative stories for the station.
“The magnitude of this promotion is not lost on me, and I feel blessed to anchor the news in my hometown, on the station I grew up watching, with an outstanding team of talented journalists and news executives,” Chatman wrote on Instagram. “I am thankful for my ABC 7 family for supporting me from the moment I started here three years ago. I am blessed to have a family that has supported me in my dreams of becoming a news anchor in my hometown. Grateful is an understatement.”
“We’re thrilled that Samantha Chatman, a Chicago original who grew up watching ABC7 Eyewitness News and later became an ABC7 intern, has been promoted to an important role on the weekend anchor desk,” said Jennifer Graves, vice president of news. “Since joining the station, Samantha has connected with our viewers, in part because of how her stories have helped consumers here but also because of her commitment to our diverse community.”
Chatman is a Chicago native who interned for WLS during her senior year at the University of Illinois. She joined WLS as a reporter in September 2019. Before that, she was a consumer investigative reporter for KXAS in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. She’s also worked at WDRB in Louisville, Ky., and WEEK in Peoria, Ill.