Lester Holt will end “NBC Nightly News”, but not journalism

In Lester gets the next job he works a role that he has not held for a long time: the new type.

As Holt, who has anchored Nightly News by Coronavirus in the past ten years^THHe will do it with the knowledge that he has a few more stories to tell. He will more often contribute to “Dateline”, the NBC Newsmagazine, which has focused on stories on true crime in recent years-and to an important contribution to the income from the news department in this process.

Holt, 66 years old, is a regular presence of “Dateline”, but usually as a host of the show, not as a narrator of the stories that fill their hour. “The big buy-in should be able to take more time,” says the anchor, while he is sitting in his office NBC news headquarters in New York. “I spent two nights in prison for a dateline,” and I made heartbreaking stories about the asthma crisis and the economy. I have done a lot of things that are outside of what many “dateline” think, but I want to do more of it, and I would like to be able to tell a producer: “Yes, I will be there for this interview next week” because I will not jump “after what’s going on for” night “.

People in the news business have expected this decision for some time. In 2021, Tom Llamas, a popular ABC news anchor who was seen as a potential successor to David Muir, jumped to NBC and speculated speculation that he was cultivated for the “nightly” role. Holt says the decision behind his exit was the result of long conversations with his wife and his top confidante. “It wasn’t like a moment of revelation,” he says. “I never saw myself forever.” Nevertheless, he didn’t want to end his journalism career. “I decided that I had to come from the” nightly “appearance, but I still had gasoline in the tank.”

The assignment “Dateline” represents a bet on a form of television journalism that has attached a herd of die -hard hards to it and has become increasingly lucrative for NBC. In addition to his weekly program, “Dateline” has expanded in podcasts and script series as well as streaming. The library helps to fill different cable plans. Holt looks forward to working “some different news muscles”, he says. “We are still doing journalism, but these are hour and two -hour shows. Some of the stories I will see will be in the manufacture.”

In the past, most evening news anchors took a step back after they wrapped their term in one of the decades of programs. Tom Brokaw, who withdrawn from “NBC Nightly News” in 2004, served as a special correspondent and analyst, while Diane Sawyer, who left the “World News” from ABC in 2014, contributed to the Disney News Division. About their achievements: an interview with Caitlyn Jenner before their transition. Norah O’Donnell, who recently left the anchor chair at “CBS Evening News”, has taken on a similar task to submit large interviews and stories and at the same time to take part in special reporting.

But Holt’s term at “Nightly” was anything but traditional. In 2015 he took over the repetition of the program after a much -cut episode in which his predecessor Brian Williams resigned from the show. “I don’t want to say that it was a scary time, but it was a worrying time,” says Holt. “Nobody wants to get a job, you know, on the back of a crisis, if you want to call it. But it was what it was. And some of the best advice I have ever got was ready to not expect the doors.”

At that time, HOLT actually considered moving away from the news – something in which he had been stirring for decades. In an earlier stage of his career, Holt was that he was “a total news -nerd” who worked for radio stations in San Francisco and Sacramento, who were sleeping next to his bed with police scanners and installed in a jeep cherokee. A promo from one of his employers, KCBs, calculated him as “the fastest microphone in the west”. Later, when Holt headed for hours of reporting in MSNBC for hours, he became known as “iron pants” because he could stay on the anchor switch without a break.

Before Holt landed the “nightly” job, however, Holt wondered whether the time had come to take on a kind of senior correspondent role after winning jobs at the weekend and at the weekend “Today” programs. He had to be ready to cover a lot of breaking stories and sometimes too many others. The “nightly” role, he says, has changed his thinking.

Hold to stabilize NBC News’ duty roster in a time of upheaval, but he was not averse to testing new ideas that can be difficult to put into practice in the evening news format.

Perhaps the most noteworthy were a number of essays at the Broadcast at the end of the broadcast, which were delivered at particularly stressed national moments, including the rise of the death of Coronavirus, the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge near Baltimore or violent outbreaks in New Orleans or Monterey Park, California. Holt went a linchpin by trying something like this, because in contrast to news programs on cables, the evening messages have largely held out from offering opinions or perspectives.

“In the past ten years I have treated many stories that deserved a personal note that deserves and recognized the depth of the tragedy that we could cover at that moment, or the strange situation in which we are in ourselves, and the fear we felt during the covid,” recalls Halt. “So I started writing these essays that carefully paid attention to not making them a pure comment. We do not give an opinion on this program, but at the same time I thought,” we miss something, “he says.” What I wanted was as it was, ‘Hey, I understand it. I just looked at the same pictures. I just heard the same stories you made. This is an unknown territory. ‘”

He also tried to bring the news program to some of his most unlikely spectators. NBC News In 2020, a special “Nightly News” dot for children started, in the hope of keeping them up to date through a vertebrae about problems that they heard about during the pandemic. The show streams on YouTube weekly, and HOLT hopes that the generation of news will keep it going. “It was such an organic moment. One of the producers proposed in a phone call:” We all freaked out of this thing. Imagine children go through. “And then this conversation developed for this program.” We made it easy. “

He seems to be confused in his first term in a similar way of an interview with Trump, which proved to be consistent for the unorthodox politician. During a recorded interview with Holt in 2017, Trump admitted that he decided to relieve the former FBI director James Comey without recommendations from officials from the Ministry of Justice, despite the white house to the opposite. The exchange brought the commander -in -chief even more examination under a legal microscope.

Holt remains modest about experience. “Sometimes it is difficult to make a politician to make news because everyone is so guarded,” he says. “I knew what questions we thought had to be answered, and he was very imminent.” Holt met Trump afterwards, but the two have never had an interview since then.

Despite the ongoing debate about the livelihood of evening news programs, Holt believes that “nightly” will exist-like the overall format. Nevertheless, there are questions where it can be guided. In the past few weeks, CBS has changed “CBS Evening News” with a two-heavy format that is exposed to the headwind of the reviews. John Dickerson, one of these anchors, organizes half an hour of streaming after the linear shipment has been completed. Lamas will also organize a streaming program in addition to the evening news tasks he will pick up from Holt. All of this indicates that networks probably expect more from their evening anchors in the future.

“I always smile when people still predict the death of the format today,” says Holt. “I think this tradition is worth in tradition. And, you know what it is, 15 to 18 million people somehow confirm this and look at the three big news programs every evening.”

He believes that a considerable audience is still looking for a material-based summary of the events of the day without the additional mustard and relish, which has become so common in many news adjacent programs sent in many cables and digital outlets.

The trick, he says, will receive a show with evening news standards about the new digital pipes that are preferred by a younger generation. “Unsere größte Herausforderung ist es wirklich, dort zu sein, wo die Zuschauer in einem Monat in zwei Wochen in zwei Wochen sein werden. Und ich denke, das ist es, worauf wir uns alle in dieser Branche konzentrieren. Wir sind fest davon überzeugt. Wir glauben fest daran, dass es immer ein Publikum für ein faktenbasiertes, aufgenannte It-it-it-it-it-it-it-is-Analyse gibt.”

“Nightly” continues, as well as Holt. “People say it was a great run,” he says. “It’s how, I’m still running.”