The White House Correspondents’ Association announced today that Saturday Night Live ‘Weekend Update’ Co-Anchor Colin Jost will be the featured entertainer at its annual dinner on Saturday, April 27 in Washington, D.C.

“Colin Jost knows how to make Saturday nights funny, and I am thrilled Colin will be live from the nation’s capital as the headline entertainer for this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” said Kelly O’Donnell, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and NBC News Senior White House Correspondent.

Jost is a writer, performer and author. He started writing for SNL in 2005 and has been the co-anchor of the show’s ‘Weekend Update’ since 2014.

In 2016, Jost and Co-Anchor Michael Che hosted special editions of “Weekend Update” on MSNBC during the 2016 Republican and Democratic National Conventions as well as the primetime “Weekend Update Summer Edition” in 2017. 

He has been recognized with five Writers Guild Awards, two Peabody Awards and has been nominated for 14 Emmy Awards for his writing on SNL. He also has written a New York Times best-selling memoir, “A Very Punchable Face.”

“His sharp insights perfectly meet this remarkable time of divided politics, and a presidential campaign careening toward a rematch. His smart brand of comedy and keen observation will turn up the heat on the national news media and across the political spectrum. A night of laughs and reflections as our dinner honors freedom of the press as a cornerstone of American democracy. I am beyond excited to welcome one of NBC’s brightest stars to one of Washington’s greatest traditions,” O’Donnell added.

The WHCA dinner is traditionally attended by the President and First Lady as well as senior government officials and members of the press corps. Proceeds from the dinner help finance all the WHCA’s work, including awards recognizing excellence in the profession and scholarships for journalism students, awarded with the hope of building a next generation of White House journalists who reflect America.

About the WHCA

The WHCA comprises hundreds of members from the worlds of print, television, radio and online journalism. Their work, for outlets based in the United States and overseas, reaches a global audience.

Since its founding in 1914, the association works to ensure that the journalists who cover the White House have the ability to seek answers from powerful officials, up to and including the President. That includes everything from advocating for access and managing the pools of reporters who stay close to the president to logistics for the press corps following the president around the world.

More About Colin Jost 

Jost started in journalism as a reporter and editor for the Staten Island Advance newspaper, a writer for the Harvard Crimson, president of the Harvard Lampoon and editor-in-chief of The Owl.

In 2020, Jost debuted “A Very Punchable Face,” a New York Times bestseller about growing up in a family of firefighters on Staten Island, learning to speak at the age of four, commuting three hours a day to high school, living in Russia during Putin’s first term and fighting in WrestleMania. It was a finalist for the Goodreads Book of the Year and won an Audie Award for Best Audio Book.

Jost also has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Huffington Post.

# # #

For more information about the WHCA dinner, contact WHCA Executive Director Steve Thomma at director@whca.press.

The WHCA co-sponsored an event with the National Geographic surrounding its new documentary on the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

WHCA President Kelly O’Donnell opened the evening with a video greeting from Clint Hill, one of the Secret Service agents who was in the motorcade in Dallas.

After a screening of one of three parts of the documentary, O’Donnell moderated a panel discussion including former Associated Press reporter Peggy Simpson, who helped cover the events of Nov. 22, 1963 and was in the police station when assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was himself gunned down.

The limited series premieres Nov. 5 at 8/7c on National Geographic with three back-to-back episodes and streams on Disney+ and Hulu on Nov. 6.

Click here to see the discussion.

The White House Correspondents’ Association at its annual dinner April 29 honored two legendary and deeply missed journalists – the late Gwen Ifill of the PBS NewsHour and Washington Week and the late Bill Plante of CBS News.

The WHCA honored their memories with the Dunnigan-Payne Prize, name for two trailblazing women journalists.

Kelly O’Donnell of NBC News, the WHCA’s vice president, presented medallions to family members Bert Ifill and Chris Plante, and recalled her own relationships with the late journalists.

“Gwen and I were colleagues at NBC back in the 90s. I didn’t know her well then, as I was visiting DC covering my first presidential race. I casually shared that I didn’t really get why a campaign made certain behind the scenes moves. As Gwen headed to her car, she stopped, turned around, and offered up her experienced and smart take on what was really going on,” O’Donnell said.

“That helped me in the moment but she gave me something bigger. She showed me that real pros… stop, turn around and help out. Her example made me want to be that kind of colleague. Thank you Gwen.

“And Bill, more than 50 years at CBS, was a master of the shouted question at the White House. Many of us also knew Bill’s gift for making presidential trips real life memories by finding time to experience the flavor of places we visited. Around the world, he would select a perfect restaurant, the right bottle of wine and bring together a group of us to hear his stories and share our own. A rooftop in Vietnam hearing about his war coverage was exceptional. He encouraged us to savor the journey of this job. Thank you Bill.”

The medallions were presented to Bill’s son Chris Plante and Gwen’s brother Bert Ifill.

About the award

The Dunnigan-Payne Prize was created in 2022 to raise up the achievements of Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne, the first two African American women to serve as members of the White House press corps. In the prize’s inaugural year, Ms. Dunnigan and Ms. Payne were the initial recipients of this award that will carry their names to honor the career achievements of White House correspondents.

William “Bill” Plante was one of the longest serving White House broadcast journalists in history, working on the beat for 35 years covering the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He served as WHCA president from 1986-87. He was beloved in the press corps for his kindness, but didn’t pull punches with the politicians he covered. He used his recognizable baritone voice to lob questions, even when the White House wished he wouldn’t.

“Our asking questions should not be dependent on what the White House thinks the mood or the tone of an event should be,” Plante said in 2007. “And the fact that they say ‘no questions’ or don’t allow time for questions really has nothing to do with it. They don’t have to answer, but I think we need to preserve and aggressively push our right to ask.”

About the honorees

In addition to his long career covering the White House, Plante also covered the State Department and had served four tours covering the war in Vietnam, including the fall of Saigon and Cambodia, the civil rights movement and all the presidential elections from 1968 to 2016.  His remarkable tenure at CBS News spanned 52 years.

Gwen Ifill, PBS NewsHour and Washington Week

Gwen Ifill was a groundbreaking journalist who covered eight presidential campaigns, moderated two vice presidential debates in 2004 and 2008 and in 2016, while battling cancer, moderated a Democratic primary debate. She was a co-anchor and managing editor of the PBS NewsHour and moderator and managing editor of Washington Week on PBS. She joined the network in 1999 to helm Washington Week, becoming the first African American woman to host a nationally televised public affairs program. At that time, she also joined the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as a senior correspondent, again making history in 2013 alongside Woodruff as the first female anchor team for a national evening newscast.

Ifill covered the White House for the New York Times from 1991-1994 and moved to broadcasting at NBC News covering politics and Capitol Hill from 1994-1999. She began her reporting career with the Boston Herald, followed by assignments with the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Washington Post.

WATCH IT LIVE STREAMING HERE.

6 – 730 PM EDT. Wednesday March 22

The White House Correspondents’ Association is pleased to announce an event discussing the press and the presidency in cooperation with the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

The panel discussion will explore the relationship between the White House press and presidents, including how both reporting and presidential communication have changed with new media such as radio, television, and Twitter.

“A big goal of mine for this year is to educate the public about how White House correspondents do our jobs and the important role an independent press corps plays,” said Tamara Keith, president of the WHCA and moderator of the discussion. “We are grateful for the partnership of the Kennedy Library since President Kennedy was the first president to truly harness the power of television.” 

The event will be at the library in Boston from 6 pm – 730 pm EDT, March 22, with attendance open in person and viewing available online.

The panel will include:

Tamara Keith

Tamara Keith has been a White House correspondent for NPR since 2014 and co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast, the top political news podcast in America. In that time, she has chronicled the final years of the Obama administration, covered Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for president from start to finish and documented the Trump administration, from policy made by tweet to the president’s COVID diagnosis and the insurrection. In the final year of the Trump administration and the first year of the Biden administration, she focused her reporting on the White House response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Keith has deep roots in public radio and got her start in news by writing and voicing essays for NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday as a teenager. She went on to work at member stations KQED, KPCC and WOSU. In 2018, Keith was elected to serve on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association and is currently its president.

Darlene Superville

Darlene Superville is a veteran Associated Press White House reporter who has covered Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Her portfolio included coverage of first ladies Michelle Obama, Melania Trump, Jill Biden and a little bit of Laura Bush. She is a co-author of “Jill: A Biography of the First Lady,” about Jill Biden. Before being assigned to cover the White House, Ms. Superville was a supervisor on the AP’s national political desk in Washington for the 2008 presidential election that saw Obama become the nation’s first Black president. She also held that role during the 2012, 2004 and 2000 election cycles. Darlene has covered Congress, federal agencies and spent several years on an enterprise writing team. She is a native New Yorker and graduate of New York University.

Doug Mills

Doug Mills has worked as a photographer in the Washington bureau of The New York Times since 2002. Previously, Mr. Mills served for 15 years as chief photographer for The Associated Press in Washington. He joined The A.P. after working for four years in the Washington bureau of United Press International. Mr. Mills won a Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1993 with The A.P. for team coverage of the Clinton/Gore campaign and won a second Pulitzer Prize for photography with The A.P. for its team investigative coverage of the Clinton/Lewinsky affair. Mr. Mills has also won numerous awards in the White House News Photographers Association. Born in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960, Mr. Mills studied at Northern Virginia Community College in Alexandria, Va. Mr. Mills is married with two daughters and lives in Arlington, Va.

Ellen Fitzpatrick

Ellen Fitzpatrick, who holds a PhD in History from Brandeis University, is Presidential Chair and Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire and has taught previously at Harvard University, M.I.T. and Wellesley College. She is the author and editor of eight books, including The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women’s Quest for the American Presidency (Harvard University Press, 2016), the New York Times bestselling, Letters to Jackie: Condolences from a Grieving Nation (Ecco, 2010); and History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past, 1880-1980 (Harvard University Press, 2002). She has been interviewed as an expert on modern political history by numerous print, television, and radio outlets including the PBS News Hour, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio. In 2021, she received the University of New Hampshire’s highest award for excellence in teaching.

Click HERE To register for onsite attendance

For more information, contact WHCA Executive Director Steve Thomma at director@whca.press

The White House Correspondents’ Association is pleased to announce that comedian Roy Wood Jr. will be the featured entertainer at its annual dinner on April 29, 2023. A correspondent for The Daily Show, Wood is an accomplished standup comedian and podcast host who uses satire to shed light on serious topics including race and discrimination in the US. His latest hour-long standup special Imperfect Messenger is now streaming on Paramount+. 

Wood was a broadcast journalism major at Florida A&M University in 1998, when he fell in love with comedy and launched his career in standup. He has been featured on just about every late-night comedy show on network TV, HBO’s Def Comedy Jam, and was one of the top three finalists on Last Comic Standing on NBC. He also executive produced the Emmy-nominated PBS documentary The Neutral Ground.

While still finishing his degree and touring as a comedian, Wood was “the voice of morning news WVHT 105.7” in Tallahassee. He later hosted The Roy Wood Jr. Show on WBHJ in his hometown of Birmingham and spent three years in Atlanta at WALR. 

Wood joined the “Best F#@ing News Team” as a correspondent on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show in 2015. But Wood doesn’t just play a reporter on TV. Journalism is in his genes. His late father Roy Wood Sr. was a pioneering radio and television journalist who covered the Civil Rights Movement in the US, the South African Soweto race riots, the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe civil war and went to the front lines in Vietnam to report that members of black platoons were dying faster than white soldiers. Wood Sr. received a lifetime achievement award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

“It’s an honor to be a part of a long-running tradition of celebrating those members of the media, who work so hard to uncover the truth, and hold our government accountable,” said Wood Jr. “It will be a great night that will go down in the history books, or not, depending on which state you live in.” 

This year’s dinner program will again be produced by Bob Bain productions, who helped make last year’s WHCA dinner a success.

“Roy Wood Jr. brings a journalistic eye to his comedy. He’s hilarious – but also makes sure his audiences are thinking as they laugh,” said Tamara Keith, WHCA president and White House correspondent for NPR. “My aim with this year’s dinner is to lift up the importance of a free and independent press to a functioning democracy, so I am thrilled to be able to feature a comedian who gets what journalism is all about.”

The WHCA dinner is traditionally attended by the President and First Lady as well as senior government officials and members of the press corps. Proceeds from the dinner help finance all the WHCA’s work, including awards recognizing excellence in the profession and scholarships for journalism students, awarded with the hope of building a next generation of White House journalists who reflect America.

The WHCA comprises hundreds of members from the worlds of print, television, radio and online journalism. Their work, for outlets based in the United States and overseas, reaches a global audience.

The all-volunteer WHCA board works to ensure that the journalists who cover the White House have the ability to seek answers from powerful officials, up to and including the President. That includes everything from advocating for access and managing the pools of reporters who stay close to the president to remodeling the on-site press workspace and handling logistics for the press corps following the president on overseas trips.

For more information, contact WHCA Executive Director Steve Thomma at director@whca.press.

Mr. Wood is repped by Mainstay Entertainment, CAA and Sechel PR.