Vanessa Echols

Vanessa Lorraine Echols (born November 8, 1960) is a television journalist and is the morning and noon news anchor at WFTV in Orlando, Florida and the morning news anchor at WRDQ in Orlando.

Echols was born in Auburn, Alabama, attending Auburn High School and later majoring in broadcast journalism at the University of Alabama. She subsequently worked for a radio station in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and television stations in Georgia and Tennessee, including WMAZ-TV in Macon, Georgia. In 1992, Echols began anchoring WFTV's Eyewitness News Daybreak and Eyewitness News at Noon. In 2007, she was named anchor of a new morning news program, Eyewitness News This Morning, on WFTV's sister station WRDQ.

Echols is a breast cancer survivor, and has served as honorary chairman for the Susan G. Komen Central Florida Race for the Cure and was keynote speaker for the University of Central Florida's 2006 Breast Cancer Update conference.