WFAA names Alisha Laventure new weekend a.m. anchor

Alisha Laventure, whose most recent gig is at cable network News 12 Long Island, will join WFAA/Channel 8 in July as anchor of the weekend editions of the News 8 Daybreak morning newscast.

Laventure will fill a spot that has been vacant since earlier this year, when Carla Wade left after the station declined to renew her contract. Various News 8 reporters have been filling in as weekend anchors since Wade’s departure. Carolyn Mungo, the station’s news director, says that the rotation will continue till Laventure’s arrival, with Monica Hernandez as the primary fill-in.

News 12 has operations in several areas of New York and Connecticut. Laventure has been with News 12 Long Island as a weekend-morning anchor, fill-in weekday anchor and reporter since May 2014. Before that, she was with News 12’s Bronx/Brooklyn operation from December 2012 to September 2014 as an anchor/reporter/call-in-show host. She began with News 12 The Bronx as a “one-woman band” video journalist.

Laventure’s other stops include WMBF in the Myrtle Beach, S.C., and a gig as a production assistant and editor in affiliate relations at CBS Corp. in New York. According to her News 12 bio, her Haitian ethnicity and fluency in Haitian Creole enabled her to help produce 60 Minutes’ Emmy-winning “The Lost Children of Haiti” in 2010.

She also was a Bogotá, Colombia-based reporter for Thomson Reuters in the summer of 2008.

She earned dual bachelor of arts degrees in journalism/mass communicatiuon and in romance languages from Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., according to her News 12 bio. “She speaks French, Spanish and Haitian-Creole,” the bio says. “While in college, she traveled the world, studying abroad in Senegal, China, Peru, France, Colombia and Ghana.”

If that all sounds real serious, we also like the part where her bio says, “She makes a mean tiramisu!” And she digs marathon games of Scrabble and Monopoly, enjoys reading New York Times bestsellers and volunteers with the Opportunity Network in Manhattan.

Follow her on Facebook and Twitter. Here are a couple of samples of her work. And yes, we admit to a fondness for adventurous eaters, as you’ll see she is in the second clip.

H/T Ed Bark at unclebarky.com

This story was originally published March 25, 2016 at 9:48 AM with the headline "WFAA names Alisha Laventure new weekend a.m. anchor."