Inside Houston's successful strategy to reduce homelessness
Since 2012, the nation's fourth-largest city has reduced homelessness in the greater Houston area by 63%. Now other cities are looking to replicate this model.
Martha Teichner has been a correspondent for "CBS Sunday Morning" since December 1993, where she's equally adept at covering major national and international breaking news stories as she is handling in-depth cultural and arts topics.
Since joining CBS News in 1977, Teichner has earned multiple national awards for her original reporting, including 12 Emmy Awards and five James Beard Foundation Awards. Teichner was also part of the team coverage of the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school shooting, which earned CBS News a 2014 duPont-Columbia Award. In 2020, Teichner was inducted into the Women's Hall of Fame by Michigan Women Forward. And in 2018, Teichner was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Newswomen's Club of New York.
In the past year alone, Teichner's work spanned the gamut of the human experience from a report on the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, to a look at how the nation's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic had become political and from a report on police violence in America to a profile of a man who is a master upholsterer at Colonial Williamsburg.
As a correspondent for CBS News, Teichner has reported on the some of the largest national and international stories of this era, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the run-up to the war in Iraq, the death of Princess Diana and the life and death of Nelson Mandela. She's interviewed world leaders and other newsmakers, including then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton twice for "CBS Sunday Morning" in 1995 and 1997.
Now based in New York, Teichner spent more than a dozen years as a foreign correspondent covering major international news. Teichner was twice assigned to the CBS News London bureau (1980-1984, 1989-1994), where she not only covered Britain's royal wedding of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer, but many wars as one of only a handful of female war correspondents. Teichner also covered the Maze Prison Hunger Strike in Northern Ireland, the Lebanon War, the 1st Intifada in 1988 in Israel and the West Bank, and the conflicts associated with the collapse of Yugoslavia (Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia). She reported on the fall of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the Romanian revolution. Teichner also spent several weeks in the Bolivian jungle reporting on undercover operations with the Drug Enforcement Agency.
During the Persian Gulf War, she was one of a small group of journalists allowed by the military to accompany U.S. troops. She spent nearly six weeks with the 1st Armored Division in the Saudi desert, but also covered the conflict from Iraq, Kuwait, Jordan and Israel.
Between her two London assignments, Teichner was based in Johannesburg (1987-1989) during the final dangerous years of the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa. She returned to report on Nelson Mandela's release from prison and in 1994 she covered his election as the first Black president of a post-apartheid South Africa. Also, between London assignments, Teichner spent three years in the Dallas bureau (1984-1987), where she covered numerous stories in Latin America, among them the Mexico City earthquake.
She began her CBS News career as a correspondent based in the Atlanta bureau (1977-1980), where her assignments included the Cuban/Haitian boatlift to the United States, the war in El Salvador and the exile of the Shah of Iran to Panama. Her reporting on the exodus of Haitian and Cuban refugees to the U.S was featured in the CBS Radio special, "Exodus: The Freedom Flotilla," which earned a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.
While in Atlanta, Teichner covered a three-month strike by the coal miners in 1978 and numerous natural disasters.
Teichner began her journalism career at WJEF Radio and WZZM-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She then became a general assignment reporter for WTVJ-TV Miami and for WMAQ-TV Chicago.
She has narrated seven "Biography" programs for A&E. Teichner is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Daughters of the American Revolution (Walter Hines Page chapter of London), the Reform Club in London, the Wellesley Club of New York, and both the New York and Charleston chapters of Les Dames d'Escoffier. Since 1995 she has served as moderator of "Conversations With ..." an interview series at the Spoleto Festival, U.S.A., the summer arts celebration in Charleston, South Carolina.
Teichner is the author of the upcoming nonfiction book "When Harry Met Minnie," to be published by Celadon in early 2021.
Teichner was born in Traverse City, Michigan. She was graduated from Wellesley College in 1969 with a bachelor's degree in economics. She attended the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business Administration. Teichner resides in New York City.
Since 2012, the nation's fourth-largest city has reduced homelessness in the greater Houston area by 63%. Now other cities are looking to replicate this model.
A new Broadway musical tells the story of suffragists and their fight for the right to vote. Two of the show's producers, Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, discuss the importance of art to spread a political message.
In his latest book, "James," the author who tackled race in such satirical novels as "Erasure" (basis of the Oscar-winning "American Fiction") re-tells the story of "Huckleberry Finn" from the point of view of Huck's enslaved friend, Jim.
Since gaining independence in 1804, the former French colony has been mired in poverty, crushing debt, violence and political upheaval, subjugated by dictators and foreign powers. And now, Haiti is ruled by armed gangs, without a functioning government.
Straight from the news, his subjects he'd choose: Martha Teichner shares an ode to CBS News' resident wit and poet laureate, Charles Osgood, who died January 23, 2024.
"Rustin," a new film produced by Barack and Michelle Obama's production company, tells of a marginalized figure who helped change society: Strategist Bayard Rustin, a pacifist and gay Black man, who organized the groundbreaking 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
The novelist's Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller is a kaleidoscopic look at the world of the stratospherically rich. He talks about the influence of Edith Wharton on his work, and the miracle of validation that came after years of writing without recognition.
In March 2021 former Wall Street Journal writer Neil King Jr. embarked on a walk of 330 miles, from his home in Washington, D.C., to New York City. He retraced his steps with "Sunday Morning," and talked about the America he found along the way.
Between 2020 and 2022, book titles banned in libraries and schools (including books on race, slavery, sex and gender identity) rose more than 1,100%. "Sunday Morning" talks with advocates for removing books from shelves, and those fighting to preserve access.
1 in 5 U.S. households bears medical debt. Since 2014, the charity RIP Medical Debt has abolished more than $8.5 billion in debt by buying up delinquent medical debt at pennies on the dollar and erasing it.
After weathering the ire of MAGA Republicans, the former president, and a foiled kidnapping plot, Whitmer is moving forward on gun reform, protections for LGBTQ rights, and enshrining reproductive rights in the state's constitution.
In Eatonville, one of the few Black towns to have survived after incorporating following the Civil War, 100 acres of land are expected to be sold to developers, a move being fought by locals seeking to preserve their community.
After a near-death experience, artist Stephen Huneck created Dog Mountain, a 150-acre leash-free retreat in scenic Northern Vermont, its centerpiece Dog Chapel, a place where dogs could be remembered by their loving humans.
Memorials honoring those killed in mass shootings are being erected in cities across the country, raising questions about what stories will be told and how best to honor the dead.
In her new book, correspondent Martha Teichner writes of the remarkable bonds formed when she sought a companion for her dog, in an only-in-New York story of serendipity, friendship and loss.