Bill Schechner Obituary, Former KPIX Reporter Has Died – Death Cause
Bill Schechner Obituary, Death – Bill Schechner has died. According to his lifelong friend Linda Schacht, who is also a journalist who worked with Bill Schechner at KPIX, the former reporter and anchor for the station passed yesterday at the age of 81 after a lengthy battle with sickness. Because of his lengthy career at CBS Bay Area, many of the employees in our newsroom refer to him as “Schechy.”
He has been employed there for the past 18 years. In 1976, he began working as a reporter who was responsible for covering a variety of broad tasks. In 1981, he left his job as a local correspondent for the NBC television network to take a position as a national correspondent for the network. Soon after that, he began serving as a co-anchor alongside Linda Ellerbee on the live, one-hour news program known as “NBC News Overnight.” During the following roughly 11 years, he kept a national audience informed with his caustic sense of humor while working in this capacity.
Schechner was the pinnacle of a journalist and was universally regarded as one of the most gifted storytellers in the business. After spending his boyhood in the state of New Jersey, Schechner moved on to pursue a career in television after dabbling for a short while in the world of radio. In 1968, he was hired to work as a reporter for a pioneering television experiment called “Newsroom,” which was carried on KQED. The experiment was aired. In 1968, there was a protracted newspaper strike in San Francisco, and in an effort to keep the surrounding areas informed, a program called “Newsroom” was produced at that time.
