Lester Holt, who anchored “NBC Nightly News” for a decade before handing it off in May 2025, unveiled a new project on August 31 with a deceptively simple premise: the instant that splits a life in two.
“Before & After with Lester Holt” premieres September 14 under the Dateline Originals banner, an NBC News podcast centered on interviews with people whose lives were upended in an instant. Colin Kaepernick, Jeremy Renner, Gabby Giffords, Adrianne Haslet and Rebecca Scofield are among the announced guests. Listeners can find it through Dateline Premium, Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and subscribers get early access. “I said when I started this new chapter, I wanted to create and exercise these new news muscles,” Holt told People, “and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
Holt also talked about the craft behind “Dateline” and its 35th season in that August 31 interview. “I think sometimes people forget that that’s one of the main components of what we do is not just standing in front of the camera, but it’s the writing. It’s how you tell the story,” he told People. “I’ve always believed, and I think a lot of people agree, that the Dateline producers and correspondents are really the best storytellers out there.”
Another assignment has him presenting a one-hour “Dateline” documentary for NBC News’ 25th-anniversary coverage of 9/11. The hour revisits New Yorkers whose experiences NBC News cameras captured on September 11, 2001, and who look back on the attacks and how the day shaped their lives.
A significant turn in Holt’s career came first. In a memo to network colleagues on Monday, February 24, 2025, he told staff he would leave his post as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” at the beginning of that summer, after 10 years at the helm. His final broadcast came on Friday, May 30, 2025. “I’ll miss our evenings together, and I’ll miss the team that brings us all together,” he told viewers. Tom Llamas, named his successor in March 2025, took the chair on June 2. Under anniversary plans reported September 3, 2026, Llamas will anchor special editions of “NBC Nightly News” and “Top Story” from Ground Zero, while Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin anchor “Today,” with Guthrie reporting from Ground Zero.
Holt, now 67, remained at the network full time at “Dateline,” where he had been the principal anchor since 2011, and hosted the podcast “The Last Appeal” earlier this year.
“Dateline” begins its 35th season on Friday, September 25, 2026 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC, with episodes streaming the following day on Peacock. Holt said the season holds longer episodes and more in-depth investigations.
The memo went out without a successor being named by NBC News. Janelle Rodriguez, who serves as executive vice president of programming for NBC News, said Holt had steered the network through a turbulent decade. “Quite simply, Lester is the beating heart of this news organization,” Rodriguez wrote in a message to staff.
When that February 2025 announcement landed, “Nightly News” was drawing around seven million viewers and ranking week after week among television’s top-rated shows. Twice — in 2018 and 2024 — The Hollywood Reporter and Morning Consult handed Holt the label of “most-trusted television news personality in America.” ABC’s David Muir claimed that title when the 2025 survey came out.
Holt got the permanent “Nightly News” job on June 18, 2015. The chair had belonged to longtime broadcaster Brian Williams, whose exit from the show followed criticism that he had exaggerated his account of a helicopter attack in Iraq. Holt arrived at the desk with eight years already behind him anchoring the newscast’s weekend editions.
The 10 years that followed handed him the stories that came to define the era. President Donald Trump’s rise in politics, the COVID pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel and the war in Gaza all came to viewers with Holt fronting the network’s reporting. He worked away from the studio, too. Towns devastated by lethal hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and mass shootings drew him back time after time.
Heads of state and leading political figures sat with him for interviews that frequently drove the national conversation. Trump sat down with him one on one. So did former President Joe Biden; former Vice President Kamala Harris; former President Barack Obama; and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, along with other newsmakers.
Holt started out in radio, covering the police beat in San Francisco at 20. Television followed in 1981, when he joined WCBS-TV in New York as a reporter. A move in 1982 brought him to Los Angeles, where the CBS station there — then KNXT and now KCBS-TV — hired him as a reporter. He returned to WCBS in 1983, then spent 14 years anchoring the afternoon and evening newscasts at WBBM-TV in Chicago.
NBC News hired him in 2000. He co-anchored “Weekend TODAY” for 12 years, and September 2011 brought his promotion to principal anchor of “Dateline,” a role that placed him at the center of the network’s true-crime and long-form storytelling. Emmy Awards number among his industry honors, and the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism came to him in 2019.
Holt looked back 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.
The stretch before the February 2025 announcement showed how wide Holt’s portfolio had grown. NBC’s election night coverage had him as a co-anchor. He also traveled to Iran for an exclusive interview with President Masoud Pezeshkian that aired in January 2025, more than a year before the war, and he anchored a “Dateline” special about the devastating 2025 Los Angeles wildfires.
He anchored “Nightly News: Kids Edition” as well. That digital newscast, built to inform and educate children, earned a nomination for a Children’s and Family Emmy in 2023 — proof that the evening-news crowd has never been the whole of his audience.
Anyone who watched him work through hurricanes, elections and war zones will find that “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. Holt has spent a career conducting that sort of interview in the middle of chaos — and it is now the premise of a show carrying his name.
