Colon Cancer Claims Veteran Journalist Leroy Sievers

Aug. 16, 2008— -- Leroy Sievers, a veteran broadcast journalist, former executive producer of ABC News' "Nightline" and the author of a popular and candid daily blog about his battle with cancer, "My Cancer," has died at age 53.

Sievers was an award-winning television producer who reported from nearly every major war and natural disaster in his nearly three decades in the business.

He was the executive producer of "Nightline" from 2000-2005, embedding with Ted Koppel with the Army's Third Infantry Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Sievers felt strongly about reporting on the work and sacrifice of American servicemen and women. It was Sievers who proposed that "Nightline" devote the entire program to reading the names of the men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan on Memorial Day weekend in 2004, a program simply titled "The Fallen," that generated controversy and even boycott during those early months of the war.

But despite his many accomplishments as a television producer, it was Sievers' writing about his battle with colon cancer that many of his colleagues and friends believe is his greatest legacy.

When his colorectal cancer, first diagnosed in 2001, returned with a terminal diagnosis in late 2005, Sievers began writing about the experience. In a daily blog published on npr.org, weekly podcasts and occassional radio commentaries on NPR's "Morning Edition," Sievers spoke wth startling honesty about living with a cancer that he knew would one day take his life.

But with the strength and stubborness that were his hallmark as a journalist, Sievers defied the medical odds.

First told by doctors he may have only six months to live, Sievers endured a battery of often painful and experimental treatments and procedures, including two brain surgeries, three lengthy back surgeries, multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation and radiofrequency ablation.

Each of Sievers' blog entries began with a simple statement of purpose, "After that day, your life is never the same. 'That day' is the day the doctor tells you, 'You have cancer.' Every one of us knows someone who's had to face that news. It's scary, it's sad. But it's still life, and it's a life worth living."

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