Lester Holt will leave his position as “NBC Nightly News” anchor this summer, the primetime fixture announced Monday.
Holt, 65, has anchored NBC’s tentpole broadcast since June 2015. He will continue in his other major role at the network, hosting “Dateline.”
“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,” Holt wrote in a memo to staffers, according to NBC News.
Holt did not give an exact date for his departure from the “Nightly News” anchor chair. Before taking over full-time, Holt worked on weekend editions of the program for eight years.
As the anchor of a major network news broadcast, Holt covered all of the biggest events of the past decade, from the elections of Donald Trump and Joe Biden to the COVID pandemic to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He also interviewed President Trump and former presidents Biden and Barack Obama.
“He has led the network during some of the country’s most fraught and challenging times in the past decade,” Janelle Rodriguez, executive vice president of programming for NBC News, wrote in a message to staff. “Quite simply, Lester is the beating heart of this news organization.”