Norah O’Donnell has grilled world leaders and Supreme Court justices. She has hosted a morning show and anchored CBS Evening News, addressing the American people from the same chair that Walter Cronkite once occupied. After a decade of overtures and countless letters, she finally landed an interview with the Pope in May 2024—a feat that not even her idol Barbara Walters was able to pull off. She has long dreamed of writing a book titled The Art of the Question—an ode to the rhetorical device she sees as foundational to her discipline. These past few months, she has been asking one of herself: Can you leave on top?
She will soon find out.
On January 23, O’Donnell signed off from Evening News. Oprah taped a surprise video message for the occasion. Her staff surrounded her lucite desk. And while O’Donnell will remain at the network as a contributor to all of its news broadcasts, including Evening News and 60 Minutes, this moment marks the indisputable end of an era.
In the time since she assumed the role in 2019, O’Donnell has covered the end of the first Trump administration, an earth-shattering pandemic, several strains of natural disasters, two presidential elections, one presidential funeral, and the first week of the second Trump administration. She has cut vacations short, woken up before dawn, hurried to the scene of a mass shooting, and scurried back to Washington, D.C. to make it to her studio for primetime. She has broadcast from an airport carrier near the South China Sea and produced segments for Evening News and 60 Minutes with missiles falling around her.
Over Christmas, with the end of her tenure at Evening News on the horizon, she unplugged for two weeks for the first time ever with her husband, the chef Geoff Tracy, and three children. “I did say, ‘If something breaks out in the world, I cannot leave or else my husband will divorce me,’” she says, laughing. She didn’t answer emails. She deferred decisions until she was back in the office. It was a preview of her future, and she liked it.
“It’s been like sipping water from a firehouse,” she says of the gig she has held until now when we sit down over Zoom a few weeks before her final taping. “And while I thoroughly enjoy it, because I love the news and am insatiably curious about what’s happening in the world, it’s also hard. We get the call, we move. It’s a privilege to have a front row seat to history. But it is sometimes anxiety-provoking.” She worries that given how reluctant journalists are to draw attention to themselves, it’s an element of their work that few discuss. Freer now, she is not so reticent: “I am open about saying it has led me to therapy.”
O’Donnell, 51, leaned in for decades, never complaining about the demands of the job. That head-down approach worked for her. After starting in journalism as a writer for Roll Call, she moved on to NBC where she popped up on Today, served as White House correspondent for NBC News, and anchored Weekend Today. When she made the switch to CBS, she was named chief White House correspondent and later co-anchor of CBS This Morning. Getting tapped for Evening News was the final promotion. The peak that reporters hope to summit; one from which most do not descend unless pushed.
Except O’Donnell is not the lone woman looking for a path down the mountain. A week before O’Donnell’s departure from Evening News, Hoda Kotb bid audiences farewell at Today. Soon Andrea Mitchell will end her noontime show on MSNBC, although she will continue to report for both the cable network and NBC News. When Kotb announced that she was leaving the iconic morning show, she said she had reached “the top of the wave” and wanted to give her children more of her attention. Mitchell framed her decision in terms of resource allocation too, telling viewers she hoped the move would give her time to “do more of what I love the most: more connecting, listening and reporting in the field.”
Individual motivations differ, but the trio of exits underscores certain universal realities: star anchors are expensive, broadcast and cable news are in decline, presidential elections are natural inflection points, and journalism is no longer Cronkite’s business. The ladder that O’Donnell climbed is now as splintered as the media landscape itself.
The women who have followed behind her know it. “We’re all seeing the same broader trends in the landscape,” says Dasha Burns, a Trumpworld expert who up until a few months ago was an on-camera correspondent and rising star at NBC News. A generation ago, someone like Burns, 32, might have chased the anchor chair. Instead, she announced in December she was leaving network TV to serve as the White House bureau chief for Politico. “The idea of what is the best, the highest, the most powerful perch in news has completely changed,” Burns says. “I don’t know that there is one anymore. There isn’t that one pinnacle, and I think that’s exciting.”
Norah O’Donnell reporting on the ground in Israel in the days following the October 7th attacks.
Burns has no time for nostalgia. O’Donnell is leaving hers behind as well. “I’ve worked so hard, and the people I’ve worked with have worked so hard,” she says. “Does part of me wish that I could have been doing it during the era of Cronkite? Well, sure. But there were limitations then too—for both men and women.”
“I think we’re going to see more change in journalism in the next 18 to 24 months than we’ve seen in the last 20 years,” O’Donnell continues. “There’s just an entire realignment.” As much as she believes in the power of the industry, she remains candid about its dire need to innovate. How can it be transformed? How can journalists reach new viewers—on their phones, not tuned into primetime, skeptical of the status quo. “No one has figured that out yet,” she says. She wants to try.
“The media changed quite some time ago,” says Connie Chung, the famed newscaster who co-anchored CBS Evening News a generation before O’Donnell and made history as an Asian-American woman on television before being ousted from the job. Economics, social media, audience preferences—all have factored into the diminishment of the news business, Chung, 78, says. Incentives evolve, publications chase new metrics, and consumers lose. “I think the average person, including me, cannot find a good source of information for just plain news,” she says. “We bounce around from one to the next. It’s so frustrating.”
Still, it hasn’t escaped her attention that it’s the most seasoned women who seem to be headed for the proverbial exits first. On Evening News, two men will take over for O’Donnell. Craig Melvin is replacing Kotb at Today. “The situation with women is not good,” Chung says. “I think women in this country have taken several steps back for so many reasons. We’re wondering how is it ever going to stop? When is the pendulum going to swing back?” In journalism, as in America, “progress is by inches,” she says. And it’s easily reversed.
Norah O’Donnell interviewing Dolly Parton in Nashville, Tennessee.
O’Donnell stresses that it was her decision to leave Evening News. In the weeks after her interview with Pope Francis aired, she started to have conversations with executives about her eventual departure. She announced her plan to step down over the summer. The extended lead time made for a long goodbye, but O’Donnell was insistent. “We made this choice after discussing what happens next, how best to utilize my talents,” she says. “What was really important for me, because of the type of ridiculous, gossip-page crap that gets written about women, was to have a timeline that made it very clear that this was exactly what I wanted to do and that I was in control of my future.”
Plus, she points out, she is staying at the network. She’s not starting a Substack or incorporating a new media company. She has no interest in striking out on her own. “I have so much respect for entrepreneurs, because creating something out of nothing is really hard to do,” she says. “I think CBS News is the best at long-form journalism and has the best producers and editors, and I don’t want to leave.”
O’Donnell insists this is “just the beginning,” and those who know her well are sure she will find her equilibrium. “Norah never stopped doing reporting and going out into the field during her entire tenure as anchor of CBS Evening News,” says Dana Bash, host of Inside Politics and co-anchor of State of the Union on CNN. “Many anchors fairly say, ‘Okay, I’m going to let other reporters do it, and I am going to stay in the warmth and the comfort behind the desk.’ She didn’t. She is just tireless.”
“I think Norah is an innovator,” adds Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today. “The fact that she’s made the decision to make this move reflects that.”
Even so, farewells are bittersweet and this one has been made more so because of her replacements. “I think it’s important to have women in these lead anchor chairs, and I think it is a setback that it’s going to be all men,” O’Donnell says.
Later, she adds, “I think there are incredible opportunities for women in journalism. But I think it would be a disservice to suggest, especially to young women who are entering the workforce, that they’re not going to encounter sexism and potentially harassment. It exists. It does. And it exists even for the most powerful women in business, media, and politics.”
She experienced it too, of course. But balancing out the low periods were moments of genuine exhilaration. In 2008, when Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were competing for the Democratic presidential nomination, O’Donnell was still working at MSNBC and NBC News. “This was before iPhones or social media, and I was so pregnant,” she says. Reporting as the results from the final nominating contests came in, O’Donnell stood in front of a green screen and pointed to the map. After, comments poured in. O’Donnell remembers hearing from friends and friends of friends and moms of friends who couldn’t believe it. “They were like, ‘I’ve never seen a pregnant woman on television like that, standing.’”
Years later, when O’Donnell took the job as anchor of Evening News, she said in an interview that she had at last found her voice as a journalist. Now that she’s leaving, she tells me she is less sure. That’s her next assignment.
