Lester Holt Explains Leaving ‘NBC Nightly News’ for Very Different Role on ‘Dateline’

After taking over from Brian Williams in 2015, Lester Holt‘s last night as host of NBC Nightly News is May 30. But he’s not leaving TV news altogether. The journalist will continue as principal host of Dateline, and he explained the appeal of this pivot in a new interview previewing his final days at the Nightly News desk.

Holt’s NBC Nightly News departure was announced on February 24, 2025. He told Variety that this exit frees up his time in a liberating way, allowing him to do the in-depth, long-form reporting he wasn’t able to produce while Nightly News took priority of his free time. Being the lead anchor of a nightly news bulletin also meant having to drop what he was doing to report breaking news as a moment’s notice. Holt is looking forward to flexing “some different news muscles” that have long been underused in this newly expanded Dateline role.

“We’re still doing journalism, but these are hour and two-hour shows we’re doing. Some of the stories you’ll see me doing will be months in the making,” Holt said.

Holt is going to be reporting more of the stories that occupy Dateline‘s hours instead of primarily hosting the program moving forward. “The big buy-in was to be able to do more of the hours,” he told Variety of the decision to leave Nightly News.

“I once spent two nights in prison for a Dateline, and I’ve done heartbreaking stories on the asthma crisis and the economy,” he went on. “I’ve done a lot of things that are outside of what many would think is a traditional Dateline, but I want to do more of those, and I want to be able to tell a producer, ‘Yes, I’ll be there for that interview next week,’ because I won’t be jumping” over to Nightly News for daily evening coverage.

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Holt said that conversations with his wife and close confidants led to his decision to step down as NBC’s evening news anchor. “It wasn’t like one moment of epiphany,” he explained. “I never saw myself doing this job forever.” But he still felt the journalism bug. “I decided that I needed to come off the Nightly gig, but I still had gas in the tank.”

Now, as he prepares to leave the desk a decade later at a time when TV broadcast journalism is struggling to stay alive (and NBC specifically is carrying out massive changes to its news programming on its affiliate networks), Holt remains hopeful that the format will not die.

“I always smile when people, even today, you know, predict the death of the format,” he said. “I do think that there is value in this tradition. And, you know, what is it, 15 to 18 million people kind of validate that, watching the three major newscasts every night.”

Holt believes there’s still a majority of viewers who want fact-based summaries of the daily news without additional commentary that’s so commonplace across live TV news. He created a children’s news programs during the COVID-19 pandemic to help kids understand what was going on in their world, and that program is still running on YouTube. Similarly, he feels a duty to appeal to younger generations and signal that journalists have their interests in mind.

“Our biggest challenge, really, is being where viewers are going to be — not where they are today — where they’re going to be in two weeks, in a month from now,” he said. “And I think that’s what all of us in this industry right now are focused on. We firmly believe there’s always going to be an audience for a fact-based, tell-it-like-it-is, smart-analysis kind of a broadcast.”