Table of Contents
Editor's Note – Television news is changing fast — but in the Twin Ports, the people behind the desk still matter. For more than a generation, Duluth-Superior’s anchors have been more than voices on a screen; they’ve been the nightly narrators of our civic life. They’ve delivered tragedy with restraint, humor with humility, and truth with the steady cadence that keeps a region grounded.
This three-part series looks at the craft and character of the Northland’s leading anchors — the men and women who still make local television feel human. Dan Hanger of FOX 21, Darren Danielson of WDIO, and Laura Lee of Northern News Now represent three eras of the same calling: connection, clarity, and community.
In a time when national media feels distant and disposable, these anchors remain something different — familiar, fallible, and fiercely local. Their broadcasts tell us not just what happened today, but who we are when the cameras stop rolling.
Howie's column is powered by Lyric Kitchen · Bar
Every era of television news eventually hands the microphone to someone new, someone who reminds viewers that the craft still matters. In the Twin Ports, that next chapter carries the voice of Laura Lee — the poised, sharp, quietly determined anchor who now leads Northern News Now into its modern age.
She arrived not as a celebrity parachute but as a working journalist with something rare in today’s local news: substance. A Minneapolis native with a decade of reporting and anchoring across Minnesota, Lee brought her experience — and her confidence — to Duluth’s cameras in 2023. Within months she became the face of Northern News Now’s evening newscasts, co-anchoring with veteran Dan Wolfe.
You can sense her broadcast discipline the moment the red light clicks on. Lee’s voice carries polish without pretense, her cadence deliberate but not cold. She has that calm, centered presence that suggests she’s not there to perform — she’s there to communicate. Viewers may not know she’s an Emmy winner or a Murrow nominee, but they feel the credibility in her delivery.
"Laura Lee is the consummate journalist," said Todd Wentworth, VP/General Manager at KBJR 6, CBS, My9 & Duluth CW. "In short order, Laura 'embedded' and embraced her new community and cares about telling the stories that impact our residents. She puts the necessary hard work and homework into her special reports and was most recently awarded an Emmy for doing so."
Her path has been anything but accidental. She built her career the old-school way: chasing stories, knocking on doors, showing up at public meetings long after others lost interest. That background gives her newscasts an earned gravitas. When she reads a lead about health care, education, or city budgets, there’s the sense that she’s lived inside those topics — not just skimmed them from a press release.
Good Reads: The Faces That Steady a Region – Dan Hanger, Darren Danielson, Laura Lee
Off-air, Lee embodies the modern evolution of the local anchor. She engages on social media but doesn’t drown in it. She connects with viewers, yet guards her privacy. She treats journalism as both profession and privilege — something that demands fairness, empathy, and restraint in equal measure.
That mix has made her stand out in a landscape often dominated by flash. There’s no gimmick to her presentation. No forced laughter at the end of segments, no anchor-banter filler. Just clean delivery and respect for the viewer’s time. It’s a refreshing change in an industry that too often confuses personality with noise.
Her strength is focus. She locks in on each story like a camera lens sharpening through fog. When tragedy strikes — a crash, a flood, a child missing — she gives the facts with compassion, never melodrama. When the topic turns complex — health policy, environmental rulings, or state politics — she slows down, enunciates, and helps the audience keep up. That’s leadership behind the desk.
Lee also represents something hopeful about where Northland journalism is heading. She’s proof that young anchors don’t have to mimic national pundits to command attention. She’s built her credibility through consistency — story by story, broadcast by broadcast. It’s the same long climb Hanger and Danielson once made, only now the terrain includes live streams, mobile apps, and comment sections.
The comparison to those veterans is inevitable. Hanger is the relatable craftsman, Danielson the statesman. Lee, meanwhile, is the reformer — the bridge between the analog past and the digital future. Her challenge isn’t reading the news well; it’s keeping television news relevant in an era when every viewer carries a newsroom in their pocket.
She seems up for it. Her broadcasts emphasize community impact, accountability, and local solutions — the kind of journalism that can survive the algorithm wars. She’s building trust the same way her predecessors did: by showing up every night, treating the audience like adults, and earning credibility one sentence at a time.
If Hanger gives Duluth its heart and Danielson its backbone, Lee gives the region its forward gaze. She reminds younger journalists that integrity is still marketable, that depth still has an audience, that calm still carries power.
She’s also part of a generation of women reshaping how authority looks and sounds on local television. No longer the token co-anchor or lifestyle host, Lee commands the main desk with equal footing — and equal expectations. The news isn’t filtered through charm; it’s anchored in preparation. And she delivers it with that quiet confidence that makes viewers sit a little straighter at home.
"What our viewers don't see is the influence she has on our newsroom and her burning desire for our news team to be at their best," said Wentworth. "Laura is a 'big market' journalist who just so happens to call Duluth home. We're blessed to have her, and our residents are the beneficiaries of Laura's story-telling."
Lee's biggest strength might also be her toughest burden: composure. In a business built on immediacy and reaction, she rarely lets emotion spill beyond the story. Some critics might wish for a looser edge, a glimpse behind the polish. But that steadiness is part of her professional DNA — a refusal to turn herself into the story.
In time, that discipline will define her legacy. Because when you strip away the graphics and the theme music, local news still lives or dies by trust. Lee gets that. She doesn’t beg for it; she earns it.
Watch her sign off at 10 p.m. and you see the smallest nod, the faintest smile — the unspoken understanding that the day’s noise has been sorted, the facts delivered, the community served. That’s not performance. That’s purpose.
And that’s how the next great anchor in the Northland is quietly building her reign — not through flash or fame, but through craft.
The torch has been passed.
Series Wrap: The Faces That Steady a Region
What these three anchors share — Hanger, Danielson, Lee — is a stubborn commitment to showing up. Night after night, through blizzards and budgets, ribbon-cuttings and heartbreak, they’ve steadied the room.
Their styles differ — Hanger’s human grin, Danielson’s unshakable calm, Lee’s disciplined grace — but their mission is the same: to keep the Northland connected and informed when noise and spin threaten to drown out truth.
They are, in their own ways, storytellers of record for a place that still values local faces and local facts. Each represents a generation — past, present, and future — of what regional television can still be when it remembers its roots: honest, neighborly, unpretentious.
Television news may never return to its glory days, but in Duluth-Superior, it hasn’t lost its conscience. It still lives in the familiar cadence of the people who tell our stories — one broadcast, one breath, one steady voice at a time.
