Floyd Kalber

Who was Floyd Kalber?

Floyd Kalber was a noted American television journalist and anchorman, nicknamed "The Big Tuna."

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he spent two years in the army during World War II and began his television career as KMTV-Omaha's first newscaster. It was at KMTV that he mentored his most famous protégé, Tom Brokaw.

Having attracted national attention for his coverage of the manhunt for mass-murderers Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, in 1962 he became a popular anchorman for WNBQ-TV, NBC's owned-and-operated station in Chicago. The broadcast quickly became Chicago's top-rated news program and remained so until WLS' introduction of the so-called "happy talk" news format in 1968. In the late 1960s, Kalber also began doing five-minute news digests in early and late afternoon timeslots on NBC, during which a national audience became familiar with his work. At various points in the 1970s, he anchored weekend broadcasts of NBC Nightly News. In 1975 WMAQ paired Kalber with the then unknown Jane Pauley, who was recruited from a station in Indianapolis; this arrangement did not succeed. Pauley left a year later to become the news anchor for NBC's Today Show.