Chuck Todd leaves NBC News before his contract expires

Longtime Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd has announced he is leaving NBC News before his contract is reportedly set to expire.

‘There’s never a perfect time to leave a place that’s been a professional home for so long, but I’m pretty excited about a few new projects,’ Todd wrote in a memo sent to fellow staffers on Friday. 

‘So, I’m grateful for the chance to get a jump start on my next chapter during this important moment,’ he went on.

‘The media has a lot of work to do to win back the trust of viewers/listeners/readers and I’m convinced the best place to start is from the bottom up.

‘At my core, I’m an entrepreneur – I spent my first 15 years professionally working for the company that started the political newsletter craze that dominates today.

‘And this is a ripe moment.’

The announcement comes days after NBC News laid off approximately 40 staffers and CNN fired nearly 200 employees. The layoffs at 30 Rock amounted to approximately 3 percent of the network news division’s workforce. 

Todd, 52, took over as host of Meet the Press in 2014 but stepped down in 2023. He was replaced by Kristen Welker, and insiders told Variety his contract was set to end sometime after the election and that he’s since been in talks with other stations.

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Chuck Todd has announced he is leaving NBC News after his contract was reported to have expired

‘There’s never a perfect time to leave a place that’s been a professional home for so long, but I’m pretty excited about a few new projects’ Todd said Friday. ‘I’m grateful for the chance to get a jump start on my next chapter’ 

‘The only way to fix this information eco system is to stop whining about the various ways the social media companies are manipulating things and instead roll up our collective sleeves and start with local,’ Todd, in turn, wrote.

He added how he was retaining the rights of his podcast, the Chuck Toddcast. He told his former colleagues the show would be ‘coming with [him]’.

‘Stay tuned for an announcement about its new home soon,’ he wrote, as other on-air personalities like Jim Acosta flee their respective stations for independent ventures.

Todd said he’d ‘continue to share [his] reporting and unique perspective of covering politics with data and history,’ so the American public may better understand ‘where we are and where we’re going.’

‘We’re grateful for Chuck’s many contributions to our political coverage during his nearly two-decade career at NBC News and for his deep commitment to Meet the Press and its enduring legacy,’ a statement from the station added.

‘We wish him all the best in his next endeavors.’

The series of statements confirmed circulating reports of Todd’s then-rumored exit, at a time where cable news is in the midst of a pronounced decline. 

Meanwhile, figures like Acosta, Megyn Kelly, and Don Lemon have moved to independent, digital ventures, with the former CNN Newsroom anchor securing some 123,000 subscribers for his Substack since his on-air sign-off earlier this week.

The announcement comes days after NBC News laid off approximately 40 staffers. The layoffs  amounted to approximately 3 percent of the network news division’s workforce

‘The only way to fix this information eco system is to stop whining about the various ways the social media companies are manipulating things and instead roll up our collective sleeves and start with local,’ Todd, seen here during his final year on Meet the Press in 2023, said

The former CNN staffer who broke the story of Acosta’s then-anticipated exit, Oliver Darcy, has also enjoyed success with a digital format – with his wildly successful Status newsletter.

Such success  shows a shifting landscape in terms of news – one CNN CEO Mark Thompson seemingly caught wind before unloading his layoffs earlier this month.

In doing so, he also aired intent to shift CNN’s operations to being more digital-based, with a streaming service and plans to circulate more short, vertical news videos.

At the time, Thompson told staff at the struggling station the future is digital – and that giving people the news they want, when they want it, is the nature of the beast. He also warned that the certainty of CNN’s future success was still ‘unclear.’ 

Darcy’s newsletter further reported the CEO recently demanded a tone-down in reporting surrounding President Donald Trump, as did SpinCo CEO Mark Lazarus, the new boss of the media conglomerate that oversees MSNBC.

On Thursday, Comcast’s executives heled a post-earning conference call to discuss its upcoming Cable spinoff, which will see networks MSNBC and CNBC split from NBC News in terms of who is running it.

This is a developing story; please check back for updates.