The Biggest TV News Departures and Shake-Ups of 2024

Change doesn’t always happen overnight… sometimes it takes an entire year. And you don’t have to be an expert reader of tea leaves to recognize that 2024 has been a pivot point for TV news.

The steady accumulation of resignations, promotions, job changes, and corporate reorgs—as well as a few notable passings of celebrated journalists—over the past 12 months confirm that a very different landscape awaits the industry beyond that proverbial revolving door in 2025.

To kick off the last full week of 2024, TVNewser looks back on some of the biggest departures, career relaunches, and shake-ups of this calendar year—and how they contributed to the larger climate of change around TV news.

January—March

• Medhi Hasan was the first prominent journalist to depart their outlet at the top of 2024. In January, the former MSNBC anchor announced that he would be exiting the network following the cancellation of The Medhi Hasan Show the previous November. Hasan later went independent by launching the Substack-based media organization Zeteo—a move that other Newsers would follow as the year unfolded.
• Former CBS Sunday Morning host Charles Osgood passed away at age 91 on Jan. 23, eight years after he retired from the program. Osgood’s soothing voice defined Sunday mornings for many viewers during his 22-year tenure on CBS and evoked a bygone era of broadcasting. “He was one of the best broadcast stylists and one of the last,” his friend and current CBS Sunday Morning host Jane Pauley observed in a statement.
• CNN began its transformational year under CEO Mark Thompson in February by overhauling its weekday morning schedule. Early Start was rebranded as CNN This Morning—with Phil Mattingly and Poppy Harlow departing the previous version of the latter show (Harlow left CNN entirely in April)—while CNN News Central moved earlier in the AM. Thompson would later outline his larger plans for the network, including a renewed emphasis on digital products.
• Elon Musk telegraphed his rightward shift early in the year, abruptly terminating former CNN anchor Don Lemon‘s much-heralded partnership with X, formerly Twitter. Lemon interviewed Musk ahead of the launch of The Don Lemon Show and asked questions that his new employer clearly didn’t care to answer. “We had a good conversation,” Lemon wrote after Musk cancelled his yet-to-debut series. “Clearly he felt differently.” Lemon deactivated his X account in November following the presidential election.
• In another short-lived tenure, former RNC chair and vocal Donald Trump supporter Ronna McDaniel was hired and then fired by NBC News in the span of five days in March. Her impending arrival created a furor among prominent MSNBC hosts—most notably Rachel Maddow—and swiftly led NBCUniversal Group Chairman Cesar Conde to cut ties with McDaniel. The incident reflected MSNBC’s attentiveness to its largely progressive audience as the election cycle kicked into gear.

April—June

July—September

• CBS News president Ingrid Ciprián-Matthews joined Kim Godwin in departing her broadcast news perch. The announcement of her exit in early July—although Ciprián-Matthews stayed in an advisory role through the November election—came against the backdrop of larger changes at CBS News, which will see its parent company, Paramount Global, merging with Skydance Media in 2025. A new leadership team was announced in August with Adrienne Roark stepping into Ciprián-Matthews’ role.
• July ended with another big change for the Eye Network: CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell announced that she would be departing the anchor’s chair and segue into a role that would allow for more long-form interviews and special projects. O’Donnell’s farewell is scheduled for Jan. 24 at which point the perpetual third place evening newscast will undergo a significant overhaul and return with new co-anchors John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois.
• In early August, CNN media analyst Oliver Darcy joined the ranks of journalists going solo, departing the network to launch his Status newsletter. He’s since broken a number of major media stories, including former New York Magazine journalist Olivia Nuzzi‘s alleged affair with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Darcy’s departure also set the stage for the return of Reliable Sources founder—and TVNewser creator—Brian Stelter to CNN
• Groundbreaking talk show host Phil Donahue passed away on Aug. 19 at age 88, inspiring an outpouring of tributes from his friends and contemporaries. Among his many accomplishments, Donahue was the first host to welcome an openly gay guest on his daytime show, humanizing a community that was still vilified by society at large.
• If you stayed up until the clock struck midnight on Aug. 25, you would have heard the final moments of WCBS 880, New York’s famed all-news radio station. After a fond farewell from Wayne Cabot, the station’s feed switched over to an all-sports format powered by ESPN. It was one of 2024’s biggest losses for local news, and the end of an institution that New Yorkers knew and loved for 60 years.
• Speaking of institutions, Jorge Ramos announced in September that he’d be ending his four-decade run at Noticias Univision. The co-anchor of Noticiero Univision stressed that it was a mutual decision to part ways. Ramos plans to announce his next move after signing off for good later this month.
• The morning show landscape is jolted by Hoda Kotb‘s announcement that she’ll depart the Today show couch early next year, with Craig Melvin taking her place. While Kotb says she wanted to spend more time with her young kids, other reports suggests that a proposed pay cut may have led to her exit. The news precedes rumblings that ABC News is looking to lower costs on GMA as it enters contract negotiations with Robin Roberts, Michael Strahan and George Stephanopoulos.
• Ahead of the election, Scripps News announced that it would be getting out of the 24/7 news game, resulting in over 200 layoffs including president of news, Kate O’Brian. Scripps president and CEO Adam Symson cited the lack of revenue growth as one of the reasons for the cuts, spotlighting the increasingly difficult economics for news outlets not backed by major corporations or a strong subscriber base.

October—December

• After 16 years as part of MSNBC’s weekday lineup Andrea Mitchell announced her departure from her eponymous newscast—but crucially not the network—in late October. Instead, like O’Donnell at CBS, the veteran reporter will segue into a new role at NBC News and MSNBC, covering stories “from a different vantage point” as she said on the air.
• Three years after exiting 30 Rock, Brian Williams got back into the news game with an Election Night special on Amazon Prime Video, which also featured a number of familiar former correspondents from legacy media outlets. Streaming live from 5 p.m. into late night hours, the event was Amazon’s first taste of news programming and other networks—not to mention other journalists—are sure to be closely monitoring whether they go back for seconds.
• Kicking off a wave of post-election departures, CNN bid farewell to Chris Wallace, who told The Daily Beast that he’d be pursuing opportunities in the streaming and podcast space. Wallace exited ahead of anticipated layoffs at CNN in early 2025.
• Fox News talent largely stayed in place for much of the year, but that changed following Trump’s return to the White House. Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth was the first to get called up to the government ranks when the president-elect nominated him as defense secretary. Trump has since sought to hire 12 Fox personalities, including Sean Duffy and Monica Crowley. Also exiting—but not to the White House—was longtime anchor Neil Cavuto, who decided to step away following a 28-year run at Fox News Media.
• The biggest industry shake-up was saved for the final weeks of 2024 when NBCUniversal News Group announced that MSNBC and CNBC would be spun off into the appropriately named new cable venture, SpinCo. Weeks later, Warner Bros. Discovery reassigned CNN to its newly-created Global Linear Networks division that house’s the company’s declining cable assets. Both moves were interpreted as signals that CNN and MSNBC—which have struggled in the ratings following the election—could look very different at this same time next year.