Lester Holt spent a decade in the “NBC Nightly News” anchor chair before handing the broadcast over in May 2025. His new project turns on a deceptively simple premise: the instant that splits a life in two.
NBC News announced the podcast, “Before & After with Lester Holt,” on August 31, and it premieres September 14 under the Dateline Originals banner. Each installment is built around 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. Dateline Premium, Apple Podcasts and Spotify carry the show, with subscribers getting 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.”
In that same August 31 interview with People, Holt turned to the storytelling behind “Dateline” Season 35. “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 said. He also said: “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.”
Stepping Away From the Evening News
A significant turn in Holt’s career came first. He announced in a memo to network colleagues on Monday, February 24, 2025, that he would give up his post as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” when that summer began, capping 10 years at the helm. His final broadcast came Friday, May 30, 2025. “I’ll miss our evenings together, and I’ll miss the team that brings us all together,” he told viewers. Named his successor in March 2025, Tom Llamas took the chair on June 2.
Llamas also figures in NBC News’ coverage marking 25 years since the September 11, 2001 attacks, anchoring special editions of “NBC Nightly News” and “Top Story” from Ground Zero. Savannah Guthrie and Craig Melvin anchor “Today” for the anniversary, with Guthrie reporting from Ground Zero.
Holt, now 67, stayed 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.
NBC News said Holt will present a one-hour “Dateline” documentary on Friday, September 11, 2026, part of the network’s 25th-anniversary 9/11 coverage. The program revisits New Yorkers whose experiences NBC News cameras captured on September 11, 2001, and includes never-before-seen footage, with those featured reflecting on how the attacks shaped their lives.
When the memo went out, the network had yet to name a successor. In a message to staff, 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.
“Nightly News” was averaging around seven million viewers at the time of the February 2025 announcement, landing week after week among television’s top-rated shows. Twice — in 2018 and 2024 — The Hollywood Reporter and Morning Consult had named Holt the “most-trusted television news personality in America.” ABC’s David Muir took the title in the 2025 survey.
“Dateline” enters its 35th season with a premiere on Friday, September 25, 2026 at 9 p.m. ET on NBC, and episodes arrive the following day on Peacock. Holt said longer episodes and more in-depth investigations are in store.
A Decade of Defining Stories
Holt won 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. Eight years anchoring the newscast’s weekend editions were already behind him by the time he settled into the chair.
The decade that followed brought assignments that came to define the era. From the anchor desk, Holt fronted the network’s reporting on 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. He worked away from the studio regularly, too, returning again and again to towns devastated by lethal hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and mass shootings.
Interviews with heads of state and leading political figures often set the agenda. Trump sat down with him individually, as did 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
Holt’s road to network news started in radio, and at 20 he was covering the police beat in San Francisco. He moved into television in 1981 as a reporter at WCBS-TV in New York, then headed to Los Angeles in 1982 to report for the CBS station there — KNXT at the time, now KCBS-TV. He returned to WCBS in 1983 and later anchored the afternoon and evening newscasts at WBBM-TV in Chicago for 14 years.
NBC News hired him in 2000. He spent 12 years co-anchoring “Weekend TODAY” 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. Emmy Awards are among the industry honors his work has earned, and he received the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2019.
In his note to “Nightly” and “Dateline” staffers, Holt looked back on that arc. “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
The assignments Holt took on in the run-up to the February 2025 announcement underscored how wide his portfolio had grown. He co-anchored NBC’s election night coverage; he 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 also anchored “Nightly News: Kids Edition,” a digital newscast built to inform and educate children, which drew a Children’s and Family Emmy nomination in 2023 — 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. Holt has spent a career conducting that sort of interview in the middle of chaos — and now it is the premise of a show that carries his name.
