John Blackstone

News correspondent, San Francisco

John Blackstone has been a CBS News Correspondent based in San Francisco since l986. He is responsible for coverage of major stories in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. Blackstone reports regularly for the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather and often contributes to other CBS News broadcasts, including This Morning and CBS Sunday Morning.

Nature seems to keep Blackstone very busy. In recent years, he has covered California fires, floods, earthquakes and drought, including the devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1989, the Oakland fire of 1991 and the Central Valley floods of 1997.

Among the other major stories Blackstone has reported for CBS News are the 81-day siege of the Montana Freemen, the saga of figure skater Tonya Harding from Portland to Lillehammer, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the biggest in U.S. history.

Blackstone joined CBS News in 1980 as a foreign correspondent, based first in London (1980-84) and then in Paris (1984-86). His assignments included reporting on wars, coups and riots across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Central America. He covered the 1981 prison hunger strike of IRA members in Northern Ireland, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, famine in Ethiopia (1984) and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa (1985-86).

He is the recipient of two Emmy Awards for his contributions to two 48 Hours broadcasts.

Prior to joining CBS News, Blackstone was a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (l974-80). Earlier, he was a general assignment reporter for CBOT-TV, the CBC owned station in Ottawa (l973-74), a general assignment reporter for the Ottawa Citizen (l972), and a news writer for CFRA Radio in Ottawa (l971-72).

Blackstone was born May 31, 1949 in Toronto. He was graduated from York University in Toronto and the School of Journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa.