CNN host Brooke Baldwin is leaving the cable news network this spring, she announced on Tuesday on her show, “CNN Newsroom”.
The 41-year-old journalist is timing her departure for the publication of her book “Huddle” in April and said she will focus on the future on what she loves most about her job: “broadening the lives of extraordinary Americans and putting my passion for storytelling to good use. “
Baldwin does not have a job scheduled after 13 years on CNN and said he is feeling “very vulnerable” but is excited about what is to come.
“After almost all of my 20 years working on the local news, I came to this network in 2008 – in the middle of the Great Recession – as a freelancer,” she said. “I scribbled my name on a post-it note and placed it outside this temporary office, determined to fulfill my dream of becoming a full-time CNN correspondent. I wanted to be part of the best of the best in cable news and journalism. And as a native of Atlantis, this would be my hometown team.
“Little did I know, I would not only realize this dream, I would flourish in this environment and get my own two-hour show in the afternoon at the age of 31.”
The presenter, a Peabody Award finalist and News Emmy nominee, said she never took for granted “the enormous responsibility and privilege” she had to work on the network while covering the “most urgent and important stories” of the time. Among them: conflicts, terrorism, environmental and natural disasters, armed violence, human interest stories, royal marriages, her digital series “Mulher Americana”, the social justice movements she said define our culture and a pandemic that changed the world.
“And politics. Too much politics, ”she added.
She felt deeply supported by viewers in April, when her fight against COVID-19 took her off the air for weeks, during which she chronicled her daily battle in a “coronavirus diary” for the network and social media.
Baldwin also sent a kiss to his program team, thanked CNN’s world president Jeff Zucker and his family on CNN, and published his first book, the upcoming “Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power”. The HarperCollins launch is scheduled for April 6.
“You know, I just need to do more. I need to do more outside this place. Outside the walls of this place. A place that I have been privileged to call home for 13 years, ”she said.
A CNN representative did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.