Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of former President and Secretary of State Bill and Hillary Clinton, has recently signed a contract with NBC as a full-time correspondent.  This is a change from the past when Chelsea Clinton remained relatively private for the majority of her life.  On Sunday, The New York Times profiled the young Clinton’s life and her newly found public persona.

By Amy Chozick for The New York Times – Chelsea Clinton, Living Up to the Family Name

OVER a series of casual dinners at neighborhood restaurants near her Flatiron District apartment in the spring, Chelsea Clinton began talking to a couple of longtime friends about something she’d been mulling for a while.

She wanted to stop pretending she was not Chelsea Clinton.

It was quite an assertion from someone who — despite the very public profile of her parents, one a former president and the other the current secretary of state — had lived most of her 31 years at a far remove from the spotlight.

Yes, there had been sightings of Chelsea over the years, as she grew from a gangly, curly-haired teenager into the confident, stylishly dressed woman making the social scene in her adopted home, New York. And, yes, her marriage to Marc Mezvinsky landed the happy couple on the cover of People magazine — and then later on Page Six when rumors circulated that there might be marital problems.

But for the most part, Ms. Clinton seemed determined to keep her private life strictly private, refusing to speak to the news media and requesting the same from her loyal inner circle. Now, however, talk turned to the notion that if she was going to face the downside of being the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton, under the constant scrutiny of the news media, why not also take advantage of the upside?

Thus, in the past 12 months, she has joined the board of Barry Diller’s Internet media holding company, IAC/InterActiveCorp; spoken at fund-raisers for organizations like amfAR; taken an increasingly public role with the Clinton Global Initiative; presented an award to her mother at Diane Von Furstenberg’s International Women’s Day event; and hosted her father’s 65th birthday at a Hollywood benefit for the Clinton Foundation with fellow guests Lady Gaga and Bono. She has even started a Facebook page.

And in her most high-profile move so far, she has taken a job with NBC News as a special correspondent, contributing to the network’s “Making a Difference” franchise. On Dec. 12, Ms. Clinton will make her first appearance on the prime-time newsmagazine “Rock Center With Brian Williams,” with a segment she developed about a nonprofit organization in Pine Bluff, Ark.

As she headed to the airport in Little Rock, Ark., on Friday evening, after filming her NBC segment, Ms. Clinton discussed in a phone interview her decision to take on a more public role. “My parents taught me to approach the world critically, but also to approach it with a sense of responsibility,” she said.

Her move to television was a career shift she initiated, having her close advisers arrange interviews with top network executives and at one point working with the powerful Creative Artists Agency.

“For a multitude of reasons, she decided the time was right to more publicly own a responsibility she feels to serve in the public good,” said Bari Lurie, a former intern in the East Wing of the White House during the Clinton years, whom Ms. Clinton brought on as her chief of staff in September.

In an e-mail on Friday, Ms. Clinton wrote, “I hope to make a positive, productive contribution, as cheesy as that may sound.”

She added, “For most of my life, I deliberately led a private life in the public eye.”

But after campaigning for her mother’s presidential bid in 2008, Ms. Clinton realized that she liked speaking publicly about issues she felt strongly about. Her grandmother, Dorothy Rodham, gave her some advice. “She told me being Chelsea Clinton had happened to me,” Ms. Clinton said, “and outside of my advocacy work and campaigning for my mom, I wasn’t doing enough in the world.”

Those conversations continued over the next couple of years — often coming up “when Marc and I were being hounded by the paparazzi for the silly reason du  jour” — until Mrs. Rodham died in November. “I took what she said seriously — that I had led an inadvertently public life for a long time and maybe it was time to start leading a purposefully public life.”

ON a chilly February night, Ms. Clinton headed to Cipriani Wall Street to attend the annual gala of the AIDS research foundation amfAR, a benefit that kicked off New York Fashion Week. There, she greeted Elton John and Richard Gere. She kissed Harvey Weinstein, a family friend, on the cheek as she took the podium to present an award to her father. “I grew up in a house where I heard Mathilde Krim’s name more frequently than I heard the people that Harvey puts in his movies,” Ms. Clinton said, referring to the doctor and AIDS activist who founded amfAR.

To read the entire New York Times article, click here.