Longest running CNN anchor Chuck Roberts has left after 28 years

In an interview today, he said the departure was amicable. He just felt like it was time to go. “It was a great long run,” he said. “I want to try something else while I still can.” What that is, he admitted, he isn’t sure and it probably won’t be TV (though he added, “you can never say never.”)

TVNewser broke the news.

He loved the variety of his job, the breaking news stories that came with the territory. Among his most memorable moments: The Challenger explosion in 1986, the Berlin Wall falling in 1989, the 2000 election and more recently, the airplane landing on the Hudson River last year.

“Every day was a thrill and an adrenaline rush,” he said. He said he’ll miss his team, many who have been with him for 15 to 20 years. “I feel like an appendage is being cut off,” he noted.

Here’s the note he sent to colleagues:

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And Roberts’ last words on HLN:

Roberts was there when CNN2 debuted January 1, 1982. “The paint wasn’t even dry on the set when we started,” he said. That became Headline News and now HLN:

He said Ted Turner in 1981, a year after CNN launched, heard about a competitor starting a rival network focused on a "wheel of news," in which news was repeated and updated every 30 minutes. He hired a bunch of young anchors from markets such as Baton Rouge, Edmonton and in the case of Roberts, Omaha. Among the more notable ones were Bobbie Battista and Lynne Russell. He said the starting salary was less than $40,000 but that was perfectly fine in Atlanta in 1982.

For Roberts, this was an exciting opportunity to go national, even if CNN2, as it was called, only had maybe one million subscribers from day one and would take five or six years to gain enough viewers to make money. (Turner would end up buying out the rival.) Roberts started in the afternoon and never left that shift – until last Friday.

“It was a great deal of fun,” he said. “We were a family.”

Though he admitted early on that they felt like “junior associates” to parent cable network CNN, he said over time, Headline News (as the network soon became) established its own identity. And once the Internet became the breaking news home in the early 2000s and ratings began to erode, Headline News began to pivot at least its mornings and prime time to more personality. The transition worked. And now it’s called HLN and some days beats CNN in ratings during certain time period.

“I’m leaving on a high note,” he said. “HLN’s ratings this summer have been terrific.”

Roberts thinks there is still a place for straight news in a world increasingly partisan. “CNN still has great reach,” he said. “It’s delivered on so many platforms. CNN.com is a leader. CNN International is seen all over the world. When you have a breaking story, people will still gravitate to CNN.”

In other HLN news, former morning host Richard Lui has landed as a dayside anchor on MSNBC, moving from Atlanta to New York. He starts August 30. (Full disclosure: I worked with Richard as an officer in the Atlanta chapter of the Asian American Journalists  Association.)

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