Brooke Baldwin, an afternoon host on CNN, announced Tuesday that she’s leaving the network after 13 years in April.
The Atlanta native has been a CNN anchor for the past decade.
“I have never taken for granted the enormous responsibility and privilege to work with some of the most talented producers and photojournalists and correspondents and anchors out there as we have covered the era’s most urgent and important stories,” she said to the audience Tuesday afternoon at the top of her show.
She listed several topics, including gun violence, terrorism, the social justice movement, politics and her American Woman series.
And she mentioned how supportive the viewers were when she got sick with COVID-19 last year.
She said she is leaving CNN without another job in hand but has a book that is coming out April 6 called “Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power.”
“There’s just more for me to do, more I need to do outside the walls of this place, a place I’ve been privileged to call home for 13 years,” she said.
She then added that she’s feeling “vulnerable,” then quoted academic and author Brené Brown: “Vulnerability is the birthplace for innovation, creativity and change, and I am excited about what is to come.”
Baldwin joined the network in 2008 and is the only anchor on the network who is Atlanta born and bred. She graduated from Westminster Schools in 1997.
CNN took Baldwin off the air in October before the election, explaining they needed more anchor time for folks out of Washington D.C.
>>RELATED: My profile of Baldwin from 2015
A graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Baldwin moved up the broadcast ranks in West Virginia and D.C., then took a leap of faith in 2008 and moved back to Atlanta with only a freelancing option at CNN.
The recession hit and her workload dropped to two days a week.
“I was wondering, ‘What have I done? I left a sure thing for Atlanta and now I’m barely working!’” she told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2015.
Over two and a half years, she remained a freelancer — until Fox News called. With Fox knocking, CNN hired her as a full-time correspondent. Within a few months, as the daytime lineup was shuffled, management gave her a coveted afternoon anchoring job. She was just 31.
She worked in Atlanta for several years until CNN president Jeff Zucker took over and asked her to move to New York, which she accepted.
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