Topline
Longtime NBC fixture Hoda Kotb on Thursday announced to the staff of “Today” that she will leave the morning show five years after taking on a co-anchor position with Savannah Guthrie and after almost 30 years with the network, citing a desire to retire and spend more time with her family.
Hoda Kotb on the “Today” show set at Windsor Castle on May 17, 2018.
Key Facts
In a letter to staff reportedly sent Thursday, Kotb said she’d been weighing the decision to leave for “quite a while” and was spurred on by her 60th birthday celebration on air last month: “A new decade of my life lies ahead, and now my daughters and my mom need and deserve a bigger slice of my time pie,” she said.
Kotb said she will be working through the beginning of 2025 and NBC did not announce any other staffing changes that will follow.
Despite leaving her anchor job, Kotb will not completely leave NBC, the network said, though it did not clarify what role she will hold going forward.
Kotb officially joined NBC News in 1998 as a “Dateline NBC” correspondent and joined “Today” as a host of the fourth-hour broadcast in 2007 before being named co-anchor of the show following the 2017 departure of Matt Lauer amid accusations of sexual misconduct.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
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