Lester Holt, the NBC News anchor who guided “NBC Nightly News” through a decade of breaking news before announcing on Monday, February 24, 2025, that he would step down, has a new project with a deceptively simple premise: the instant that splits a life in two.
The new series, “Before & After with Lester Holt,” will center on interviews with people whose lives were upended in an instant — an approach that draws on the questioning skills Holt has sharpened in radio and television news.
Stepping Away From the Evening News
The show arrives after a significant turn in Holt’s career. Writing to network colleagues in a memo that Monday, Holt announced that he would give up his post as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” at the beginning of that summer, after 10 years at the helm of the broadcast. He remained at the network in a full-time role at “Dateline,” where he had been the principal anchor for almost 15 years at the time of the announcement.
NBC News did not immediately name his successor when the memo went out. Janelle Rodriguez, executive vice president of programming for NBC News, credited Holt with steering the network through a turbulent decade. “Quite simply, Lester is the beating heart of this news organization,” Rodriguez wrote in a message to staff.
At the time of the February 2025 announcement, “Nightly News” consistently placed among television’s top-rated shows each week, averaging around seven million viewers. Holt had twice been named the “most-trusted television news personality in America” in consecutive polls from The Hollywood Reporter and Morning Consult.
A Decade of Defining Stories
Holt landed the permanent “Nightly News” job on June 18, 2015, succeeding longtime broadcaster Brian Williams, who left the show amid criticism that he had exaggerated his account of a helicopter attack in Iraq. By the time he settled into the chair, Holt had already spent eight years anchoring the weekend editions of the newscast.
What followed was a decade of assignments that came to define the era. From the anchor desk, he fronted the network’s reporting on President Donald Trump’s rise in politics, the Covid pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the attack in Israel and the war in Gaza. He also regularly worked away from the studio, returning again and again to towns devastated by lethal hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and mass shootings.
His sit-downs with heads of state and leading political figures often set the agenda. Among those who granted him individual interviews were Trump; former President Joe Biden; former Vice President Kamala Harris; former President Barack Obama; and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, along with other newsmakers.
From the Police Beat to the Anchor Desk
Radio is where Holt’s road to network news began; at 20, he was covering the police beat in San Francisco. Television came in 1981, when he signed on as a reporter at WCBS-TV in New York, before a move to Los Angeles and a reporting job at KCBS-TV, which was called KNXT at the time. He came back to WCBS in 1984 and went on to anchor the afternoon and evening newscasts at WBBM-TV in Chicago for more than 10 years.
NBC News hired him in 2000. He also co-anchored “Weekend TODAY” for 12 years and became principal anchor of “Dateline” in September 2011, a role that kept him at the center of the network’s true-crime and long-form storytelling. His work has been recognized with industry honors including Emmy Awards, and in 2019 he received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Holt reflected on that arc in his note to “Nightly” and “Dateline” staffers. “I could never have imagined my career path would unfold in the way it has. What an amazing ride,” he wrote.
Iran, Wildfires and a Kids’ Newscast
Holt’s assignments in the stretch before the February 2025 announcement underscored how wide his portfolio had grown. He co-anchored NBC’s election night coverage, traveled to Iran for an exclusive interview with President Masoud Pezeshkian and anchored a “Dateline” special about the devastating 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.
He has also anchored “Nightly News: Kids Edition,” an Emmy-nominated digital newscast built to inform and educate children — a reminder that Holt’s audience has never been limited to the evening-news crowd.
For viewers who followed him through hurricanes, elections and war zones, “Before & After with Lester Holt” points at a quieter kind of story: not the sweep of a national crisis, but the single moment that rewrites one person’s life. It is the sort of interview Holt has spent a career conducting in the middle of chaos — and now the premise of a series that carries his name.