Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP
NBC’s Today Show co-anchor Hoda Kotb announced on Thursday that she would be leaving the show after 17 years. She will stay on through early 2025 and will continue to contribute to the show.
The announcement came during the show’s morning broadcast alongside co-anchor Jenna Bush Hager and several other NBC hosts:
In a post from Today‘s Instagram account, Kotb said: “My time at NBC has been the longest professional love affair of my life. But only because you’ve been beside me on this twenty-six-year adventure. Looking back, the math is nuts.”
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In her emotional announcement, Kotb said that she came to her decision after celebrating her 60th birthday with her colleagues and felt like she was at “the top of the wave” and it was “time to turn the page”:
I just turned 60. And it was such a monumental moment for me when I turned 60 years old because I started thinking about that decade. Like, what does that decade mean? What’s it hold? What’s it going to have for me? And I realized that it was time for me to turn the page at 60 and to try something new. And I think I realized that this was so crazy. But remember our 60th birthday that we had outside? It was so I can see it. And I remembered standing outside looking at this beautiful bunch of people with all these gorgeous signs. And I thought, like, this is what the top of the wave feels like for me. And I thought, it can’t get better.
And I decided that this is the right time for me to to kind of move on. And then I thought about, obviously I had my kiddos late in life and I was thinking that they deserved a bigger piece of my “time pie” that I have. I feel like we only have a finite amount of time. And so with all that being said, this is the hardest thing in the world, because just today I was looking at my phone, and all you guys are holding my kids and I was like, my gosh. I kept looking at all the pictures anyway, but I’m not. I’m going to be here through the rest of the year past the first of the year, and I’m going to stay in the NBC family. But it’s kind of a big deal for me.
Kotb told The New York Times about her plans on Wednesday, saying: “I just thought the universe was speaking to me. This is a time in life for looking inside you, and figuring out what your yearnings are, your callings — where or what direction you’re headed during this new decade.”
Kotb’s departure marks the end of what became a new chapter for NBC. In 2017, longtime Today co-anchor Matt Lauer was abruptly fired after being accused of sexual misconduct, one of the many sordid workplace revelations that became the Me Too movement. Kotb, who was then co-hosting the dishier 10:00 AM hour, was brought in as a last-minute substitute. But her chemistry with then-co-anchor Savannah Guthrie worked out so well that she stayed on. Hager became Kotb’s new 10:00 AM co-anchor in 2019.
This story has been updated.
