Longtime CNN Newsroom anchor Brooke Baldwin announced her surprise resignation from the cable news network on-air today, telling viewers that she’s leaving in April to focus on “amplifying the lives of extraordinary Americans and putting my passion for storytelling to good use.”
“Before we get going, I want to start with some personal news,” Baldwin said at the start of her 3 p.m. ET show. “I will be leaving CNN in April.”
She continued: “Let me back up. After most of my 20s working my way up in local news, I came to this network in 2008 – in the midst of the Great Recession as a freelancer. I remember I scribbled my name on a Post-It note and stuck it outside of this temporary office, determined to fulfilling my dream of becoming a full-time CNN correspondent.”
The Peabody Award winner joined CNN in 2008 and also the creator and host of CNN’s digital series American Woman, which focuses on the stories of trailblazing women who have broken barriers in their respective fields and are now helping other women do the same.
Thanking outgoing CNN president Jeff Zucker and the “very large CNN family,” Baldwin said, “I don’t have a job I’m jumping right into, and yes, I’m feeling very vulnerable.”
She continued: “For a decade I’ve never taken for granted the enormous responsibility and privilege I’ve had to work with some of the most talented producers and photojournalists and correspondents and anchors out there as we have covered our era’s most urgent and important stories, conflicts, terrorism, environmental and natural disasters, the wrath of gun violence, royal weddings, my American Woman series, the social justice movement that defines our culture and a pandemic that changed the world.
“I wanted to be part of the best of the best in cable news and journalism, and, as a native Atlantan, this would be my hometown dream. Little did I know, I would not only go one to fulfill that dream, I would flourish in this environment and land my own two-hour show in the afternoon at the age of 31.”
A Peabody Award finalist and News Emmy nominee, Baldwin said that for the past two years she has been writing her first book. HarperCollins will publish Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power in April.
“You know, there is just more I need to do,” she said, “more I need to do outside of this place, outside the walls of this place, a place I’ve been privileged to call home now for 13 years.”