Vicki Vale is a character in the fictional universe of the Batman comic book series. Originally portrayed as a plucky newspaper reporter, in more recent incarnations she often appears as a television news anchor.
Vicki's first ever appearance was in Batman #49 (Oct/Nov 1948), written by Bill Finger with art by Bob Kane. Originally she had red hair, and her look is said to have been based on that of a young model named Norma Jean Mortensen, who would later become better known as Marilyn Monroe, and indeed, the early drawings of Vicki Vale do in fact look a lot like the young Norma Jean.
In her earliest appearances, Vicki Vale seems to have been clearly modeled after Lois Lane in the Superman line of comic books. Just as Lois Lane covers Superman's exploits for the Daily Planet, Vicki Vale covers Batman's activities for the Gotham Gazette. Both characters had the same plucky personality and served as on-and-off love interests for their respective heroes.
In the mid-1960s, however, Vicki became a victim of the purge of many Silver Age Batman characters, and largely disappeared from the comics, making only a few brief cameo appearances in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Vicki returned to prominence, however, in the 1989 Tim Burton big-screen adaptation of Batman, starring Kim Basinger as a blond newspaper reporter who first investigates and then eventually falls for the Batman. This character was actually more heavily based on a 1970s comic book character named Silver St. Cloud, but that name was deemed too silly to be in a major motion picture, so the name and some of the character of Vicki Vale were pulled out of the vaults.
Since that film, Vicki has continued to make occasional, but still rare appearances in Batman stories across various media, increasingly as a television reporter rather than a newspaper journalist, but almost never appears as a major character.