The Very Public Self-Destruction of Alycia Lane

Over the years, and then particularly after the bikini incident, Lane often told people, “I didn’t sign up for this.” She thought she was under an unfair microscope. But as Inquirer gossip columnist Michael Klein tried to explain to her time and again, “Once you hit the New York Post, you’ll always have hit the New York Post.”

The strange thing is, Lane never set out to be in front of a camera. At SUNY-Albany, she wanted to be a magazine writer. Fresh out of college, with not much more on her résumé than a bartending job and an honors thesis, she applied for a position at Modern Bride.

“She was smart and articulate and enthusiastic,” says Linda Platzner, then the head of sales and advertising at the magazine. But it was Lane’s aggressiveness that convinced Platzner to hire her. A year and a half later, Lane took off for grad school in magazine writing at Northwestern’s prestigious Medill School of Journalism.

She loved reporting. She got her first-ever byline in April 1997, when the Illinois Times published an article she wrote about a teacher convicted of marijuana possession. A friend framed the story for her; it still hangs in her apartment. But she kept crossing paths with the students in broadcasting, and listening as they talked about “editing tape” and “cutting video,” which seemed even more exciting than what she was doing.

So she switched to TV, and tried to catch up fast. When she graduated and sent out her résumé tape — broadcasts of her covering scintillating stories like the marriage tax proposal and capital gains — she would have taken a job anywhere.

A friend passed her tape to Roberto Soto, who was putting together a news station in the Bronx in 1998. With the large Hispanic population there, Soto was glad to find a Spanish-speaking reporter like Lane. Lane’s mother is Puerto Rican; her father, who worked at Macy’s, is Welsh. She’d grown up on Long Island, with two older brothers and younger sister Nicole, who always tagged along with her “seeeeeester,” as they still call each other today. They shared a bedroom, building forts out of their twin beds, spending hours doing each other’s hair for the dances at Daniels Top-O-The-Poconos resort, where the family vacationed in the summer. Nicole was only cool in high school by proxy, hanging out with her über-popular big sister and her sister’s football-player boyfriend and cheerleader friends. “Everybody talked about my sister,” Nicole says. “She’s beautiful. She had a great personality. A lot of people were drawn to her.”

When Soto offered Lane around $28,000 a year to be a reporter at News 12, she felt lucky to land so close to her family. She was in good company professionally, cutting her teeth with other pretty newbies like Taina Hernandez (currently co-anchor of ABC’s World News Now) and Natalie Morales (now on The Today Show). But there was nothing glamorous about News 12. All the reporters were one-man bands. They shot, wrote and edited their own material.