TV’s Stephanie Ramos wears two hats – and one is an army helmet
Stephanie Ramos doesn’t drink coffee.
Being an ABC News national correspondent, appearing on “Good Morning America,” “20/20,” “World News Tonight with David Muir,” “Nightline” and “ABC News Live,” jetting all over the world, reporting on stories ranging from the border crisis to the war in Ukraine to the Highland Park shootings to the Alabama senate race — that’s her coffee.
“When you’re walking into ‘Good Morning America’ and you see your colleagues and the crew and excitement that show brings, it just kind of gives me natural energy,” says Ramos, who has been on the staff of ABC News since 2015, and has been a Bergen County resident since 2019. “Coffee just never really stuck. I never acquired a taste for it.”
These days, she hardly needs more adrenaline. She got an extra jolt just last December — when she was named an interim host of “GMA3,” the “Good Morning America” spinoff, after Amy Robach and T.J. Holmes were suspended by scandal. It raised her profile considerably, though she might have chosen other circumstances. “It was a wild time,” she says. “But we had a job to do, and that was to put a show together. When I got the call to fill in, that was what was on my mind. I’ve got a job to do, I’ve got people relying on me, I can’t screw this up.”
Call of duty
If she sounds a bit like a soldier on a combat assignment, that’s no coincidence. Because in addition to being a reporter — which can be a high-wire job — and a national figure familiar to millions of TV viewers — which can be more so — Stephanie Ramos has a whole second life.
As Major in the Army Reserve, she oversees her own team of soldiers one weekend every month. When she’s not reporting, she’s reporting for duty. “I don’t want to toot my own horn, but that makes me unique in this role,” she says.
“I don’t believe there are any other national correspondents who are also serving. There are one or two who have served. But who are actively in the reserve, and actively a national correspondent? I don’t believe that exists right now.”
For 20 years, Ramos has toggled back and forth between journalism and the military. In 2002, soon after 9/11, she enlisted in the Army Reserve. In 2005, she was an NBC page at 30 Rock (that’s where she met her husband). That same year, she was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Reserve. In 2007, she was working at WIBW, a CBS affiliate in Topeka, Kansas. In 2008, as a first lieutenant, she was deployed to Baghdad.
In 2012, she was back stateside, working at KMBC, an ABC affiliate in Kansas City, Missouri. And since 2015, she’s been on the staff of ABC News in New York — all while putting in her time in uniform, and raising her two children. “It’s been a long road, but I guess it’s been worth it,” she says. “To now be here, fulfilling my dreams… This is the job of my dreams.”
The big ask
To live those dreams, she’s asked a lot of herself. She’s also asked a lot of her employers, the military and — especially — her family. “All of this wouldn’t be possible without them,” she says. “I know people say that all the time. But the support of my husband and my mom and my sisters is what’s made this all possible.”
Juggling the army, a TV career and a domestic life has been a challenge. She’s moved a lot. Time and again, she’s had to pull up stakes at short notice, re-settle, re-calibrate her life. She and her family had barely moved into their new house in Bergen in 2022 (they’d moved to the town three years earlier) when she was called away again. “A week, or maybe a couple of days, after moving in, I got a call,” she says. “This was January of ’22. They asked me if I could go to Ukraine. Because they were anticipating the start of the invasion. I said, ‘Absolutely I’ll go. When?’ ‘Tonight.’”
It would mean leaving her husband, Emio (they married in 2010), her two young sons and a house full of unpacked boxes. “I told my husband, and the first thing he said was, ‘OK. Go. Do great. And don’t worry about anything here.’ That’s been his approach all these years. No matter what chaos is happening in our lives, if work calls, this is why we’re here. So I went to Ukraine, and I was there for almost two weeks.”
Inside knowledge
It is, of course, precisely the kind of story Ramos would be tapped for. Her combination of reporting chops and military experience makes her uniquely valuable when the occasion demands a war correspondent. “I have this perspective of more than 20 years in the military that I bring,” she says. “Especially if I’m covering a military-related story.”
Her own personal history gives her a stake in this kind of reporting, something both her viewers and her colleagues appreciate. “With Stephanie, you’re always getting the news from someone who really cares about it,” says her ABC (and Good Morning America) colleague Michael Strahan. “Her storytelling has a unique angle, developed from her military service as an Army Reserve Major, making her a crucial part of our ABC News family.”
Such stories don’t always come from a war zone. There was, for example, the grim saga of Vanessa Guillén, the Fort Hood soldier who disappeared in April 2020 and was discovered two months later, dismembered and burned. Everybody covered it. Everyone got frustrated by the military’s opaque response. But Ramos’ service background gave her a sixth sense about the difference between ordinary military reticence and active stonewalling. It later came out that Guillén had been bludgeoned and dismembered by a fellow soldier, with his girlfriend as accomplice.
“I thought it was really odd that the public affairs officers at that base were so tight-lipped,” she says. “As a military person, I know there is this guard, this wall between civilians and the military. Until they have their facts together, they’re not going to come forward. But this was different. I told my team, we have to push, because something’s not right here. We should be getting answers. The family should be getting answers. And obviously, we know what happened with that story.”
9/11 changed everything
Given her very complicated twotrack life, you might assume that Ramos had set her mind on a journalism career, or a military career — or both — from the get-go. In fact, she hadn’t grown up interested in either. A performing career — that’s what the Bronx-born Ramos, born of a Dominican mother and Puerto Rican father, originally had in mind. Fame. “I wanted to be a star,” she says.
She did have a singer’s pipes and an actor’s energy. Between 7th and 12th grades, she went to the Professional Performing Arts High School in New York (her mother had attended its predecessor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, the setting for Fame.) “I was into Broadway, I was auditioning for Broadway, for offBroadway shows,” she says. “I wanted to be in the arts in some capacity.”
She was in fact down in Miami, auditioning for a slot in a pop group, when 9/11 happened. “I was one of three young ladies selected to be part of a pop Latina singing group,” she says. “We were going to tour internationally.” Instead, she watched the TV, thunderstruck, as the towers came down.
“I remember being in the hotel lobby glued to the TV, for hours and hours,” she says. “I wanted so much to be in the city that day. I felt like my home needed me. And here I was, stuck in Miami. I remember seeing those towers every single day, in my childhood. To see them disappear, to this day it’s unbelievable. It just made a huge impact on me.” That, she says, is when she knew.
“I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to be part of something bigger than singing,” she says. “I wanted to be part of an organization to prevent something like this from happening ever again.”
All in the family
There was a service tradition in Ramos’ family; her father was in the Marine Corps, her stepfather in the Coast Guard. It wasn’t so much of a leap for her to join the army reserves in 2002 and do her basic training while studying journalism and communications at Iona University in New Rochelle and Fordham University in The Bronx. Using her performance skills to broadcast news, rather than sing pop tunes, seemed important just then.
“Having been on stage really helped my journalism career,” she says. “Not having stage fright, not being nervous. Not to say that I was never nervous. But what I always tell my kids now is, if you’re prepared, you won’t fail. If you’ve done the work and prepped for it, then yeah, you’re going to feel those butterflies, but you’ll be ready for it.”
For years, she juggled classes, physical training, and gigs at various TV stations. It wasn’t easy. One period, when she was working as an assignment editor for WIS-TV in Columbia, South Carolina, while simultaneously completing the Army’s Officer Training Course at Fort Jackson, was especially daunting. That would have been 2006.
“I would go to PT at 4:30 in the morning,” she says. “And it was a rigorous course, very hard core training. Then back to my barracks, shower, get ready for the day, go to my class all day, homework, and from there I would race to WIS so I could keep this job, which was until midnight. I was fortunate that I had some really good classmates. I remember many times folks banging on my door at 4 a.m. telling me it’s time for PT, and getting me there in time.”
But all the training and preparation in the world won’t make you ready for the real thing. That was in 2008, when Ramos — inspired to join, you’ll recall, by 9/11 — finally had her chance to go to the Middle East.
Boots on the ground
“I’ll never forget being at the top of one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces, and just seeing the countryside,” she recalls. “It was so pleasant, you almost forgot you were in the middle of a war zone. I remember asking one of the young sergeants with us, ‘What is that over there? There seems to be a fire.’ And he looks at me and says, ‘That’s a firefight.’ There was an actual firefight happening. That’s when it hit me: this is happening. This is not ROTC any more.”
Such experiences will make anyone shock-proof. A journalist is no exception. To her role as correspondent, Ramos brings a soldier’s discipline. “For years I’ve heard from managers, in meetings, in evaluations: Stephanie Ramos, you’re unflappable,” she says. “Anything can be thrown at me. I think it’s partly me, as a whole, but some of it is my military training. We’re trained not to panic, whatever the situation. Because when you panic, you lose time. And that’s where you’re going to fail.”
Broadcasts don’t always go smoothly. Stuff, as Donald Rumsfeld said, happens. But however gnarly it gets, Stephanie Ramos can always console herself with this thought: it’s no Baghdad. “My perspective is, it’s OK, we can do this,” she says. “This is not life or death. It’s just a matter of taking a moment, taking a breath, figuring out the task at hand, and getting it done.”
Soldiers are also trained to complete the mission. And Ramos has that kind of tenacity when she’s out on a story.
Making a connection
Last year brought a harrowing one: the Independence Day parade shooting in Highland Park, Illinois, that left seven killed, 48 more wounded. In July, 2022, she was on the ground, talking to the shocked and traumatized. “One lady had a very unique story,” she says. “She was there on the parade route when the shooting began. And this child was in a stroller by himself. His parents had been shot, and they had died. She was right there next to the stroller. And she picked up the boy and ran with him to safety. That gives me chills.”
It was — understandably — not a story this woman wanted to relive. Especially so soon after the fact, and in front of national TV cameras. When ABC’s bookers found her and inquired whether she would appear on-camera with Stephanie, they got a firm “no.”
That’s when Ramos brought her own special skill set to bear.
“Long story short, I went to the woman’s home, and there she was — and those moments are hard,” she says. “But I was able to get her to understand that I’m a mom too, I get this, this is horrible that we have to be here. Anyway, she spoke to us. Exclusively. Just because we were able to empathize and connect on a human level. Not showing up with my photographer right behind me, my notebook in my hand, and my pencil. That’s not how you show someone you’re human.”
If her persistence comes from her army training, part of her empathy comes from the fact that, as a Latina, she’s often been the odd woman out. “I can’t tell you the amount of times somebody’s walked up to me when I’m standing on the corner doing a live shot and I hear, ‘Stephanie Ramos, we’re so proud of you!’ And I get where she’s coming from. Knowing that there aren’t many that look like me on the national level.”
Like any trailblazer, a big part of her story has been Proving Them Wrong. “Along the way, I was told I couldn’t do things,” she says. “Whether it was join the military and be successful, or have any career on TV,” she says. “I saw it all as a challenge to push harder.” Representing an underrepresented community, it also falls on her to draw the network’s attention to the stories that aren’t being told. Stories that other people wouldn’t think to tell. “That’s a lot of responsibility,” she says.
Time out
Stephanie Ramos, in brief, has a lot on her shoulders. Happily, Bergen is just the place to take a load off. “Lovely neighborhood, lovely people, and we have our things to do,” she says.
When she’s not home with her husband, a video producer and commercial real estate investor, kids, and their “pandemic puppy” — a mini Goldendoodle named Josie, who joined the household in 2020 — she’s liable to be found at Brasserie or Cafe Angelique in Tenafly, or The Shops at Riverside, or Westfield Garden State Plaza mall. The kids like iFLY in Paramus, and American Dream. “They go to the Nickelodeon theme park,” she says.
There’s no shortage of leisure activities here — even if, for Ramos, there is sometimes a shortage of leisure. Best of all, she still gets to sing. More than 20 years after she gave up her dreams of Broadway stardom, Ramos is finding a new use for those musical chops. “I’ve been singing the national anthem at baseball games and different sporting events,” she says. She started doing it in 2003, and she’s been doing it on and off ever since. But one of her biggest thrills was in 2019, when she got to do it at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for a Knicks-Nets game.
“I will never forget that moment,” she says. “It was a full-circle moment for me. Because here I was, it was 2019, and we had just moved back to the New York area, now with my own family, our two kids, my husband, and this dream job I had worked so hard for, for so many years. And now singing again, at Barclays. And it was such a New York thing, with two New York teams.”
Those are just a few of the things Stephanie Ramos does with her too-limited time. Between her military, civilian and family life, there’s very little she doesn’t do.
Except coffee.
“On a regular basis, absolutely not,” she says. “On a breaking news story, it’s kind of hard to remember to eat.”