The changes to the evening news keep coming.
Lester Holt, a longstanding NBC Nightly News anchor, revealed on Monday, February 24, that he will leave the show this summer after more than a decade.
In a note to Nightly and Dateline workers, the 65-year-old said, “A smile comes to my face when I think that with Nightly News and Dateline, I have now anchored two of the most successful and iconic television news programs in broadcast history.”
“As a 20-year-old radio reporter on the police beat following breaking news in San Francisco, I never anticipated my professional path would expand as it has.” What an amazing ride.”
Holt took over as Nightly News anchor in June 2015 after Brian Williams left, and the network’s executive vice president of programming, Janelle Rodriguez, said of his more than two decades at NBC: “He has led the network during some of the country’s most fraught and challenging times in the past decade. Simply said, Lester is the pulsing heart of this journalism operation.
Holt’s resignation follows a slew of comparable departures at other networks in the weeks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
Chuck Todd, Holt’s NBC colleague, also startled viewers when he announced his unexpected retirement from the network on Jan. 31, after almost two decades. He added in a message to staffers that he was “pretty excited” about a “few new projects” in the works and that his experience at NBC, which includes anchoring Meet the Press for nine years, was the “honor of a lifetime.”
Jim Acosta abruptly left CNN a few days ago, ending an 18-year tenure, reportedly due to an internal conflict over the timing of his show.
Another nightly news shake-up occurred on February 7, when MSNBC veteran Andrea Mitchell ended her tenure on Andrea Mitchell Reports after almost 17 years. Her departure had been announced in October, when the daily show confirmed its plans to end.
“After sixteen years of being in the anchor chair every day, I want time to do more of what I love the most: connecting, listening, and reporting in the field, especially as whoever is elected next week is going to undertake the monumental task of handling two foreign wars and the political divisions here at home,” Mitchell, 78, told reporters at the time.