Olessa Stepanova joins WCVB’s morning team this week as the station’s traffic reporter.
Jon Chesto
Managing Editor, Print- Boston Business Journal
There’s a new woman keeping an eye on Greater Boston’s traffic jams this week now that WCVB has recruited Olessa Stepanova from the CBS affiliate in Connecticut.
Stepanova starts Monday, joining anchors Bianca de la Garza and Randy Price and meteorologist Cindy Fitzgibbon on Channel 5’s EyeOpener morning newscasts. Stepanova had been the morning traffic reporter on WFSB’s Eyewitness News This Morning in the Hartford market for the past three years.
Stepanova replaces Dorothy Krysiuk, who was with WCVB for three years before leaving in July. Kevin Brennan has been handling the traffic reporting responsibilities in the interim for the Boston area’s ABC affiliate, and he signed off Friday.
A spokeswoman for WCVB tells me that the station’s managers picked Stepanova months ago for the job but they needed to wait until the new year before she could appear on WCVB because of a contract with her previous employer. As with Krysiuk, Westwood One will technically be Stepanova’s employer.
Stepanova is a Russian native who moved to Queens, N.Y., with her family in 1992. Prior to her time in Connecticut, Stepanova worked as a traffic reporter at two cable TV stations in the New York metro area, first News12 and then NY1.
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