Lester Holt, who anchored “NBC Nightly News” for a decade before handing the broadcast over in May 2025, announced a new project on August 31, 2026, built on a single idea: the instant that divides a life into a before and an after. It arrived Monday morning.
“Before & After with Lester Holt” released its first episode on September 14, a six-part series of interviews with people whose lives were upended in an instant. NBC News named five guests: Colin Kaepernick, Jeremy Renner, Gabby Giffords, Adrianne Haslet and Rebecca Scofield. Dateline Premium subscribers heard the first episodes from September 7; the show is also on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. “I wanted to create and exercise these new news muscles,” Holt told TVInsider, “and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
The guest list runs from the famous to the barely known. Kaepernick knelt during the anthem in 2016 and never played again; his memoir publishes Tuesday. Renner was crushed by a snowplow on New Year’s Day 2023. Giffords was shot in the head in Tucson in 2011. Haslet, a professional ballroom dancer, lost her left leg below the knee in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and has since run the race. Scofield, a history professor at the University of Idaho, was falsely accused on TikTok of involvement in the 2022 murders of four students there and won a $10 million defamation verdict in March.
Leaving the Evening News Behind
The podcast follows a major turn in Holt’s career. In a memo to colleagues on Monday, February 24, 2025, he said he would give up his post as anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” at the start of that summer, after 10 years. 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. Tom Llamas, named his successor on March 5, took the chair on June 2. Holt, now 67, stayed at the network full time at “Dateline,” where he had been principal anchor since 2011, and launched the podcast “The Last Appeal” that September.
No successor had been named when the memo went out. Janelle Rodriguez, executive vice president of NBC News programming, said Holt had guided the division through 10 turbulent years. “Quite simply, Lester is the beating heart of this news organization,” Rodriguez wrote to staff. “Nightly News” was still among television’s top-rated programs, averaging around seven million viewers a week by NBC’s count. Twice, in 2018 and 2024, The Hollywood Reporter and Morning Consult had named Holt America’s most trusted news anchor; ABC’s David Muir took the evening-news title in the 2025 survey, in which NBC’s own Al Roker ranked highest of all.
NBC gave Holt a central role in its 25th-anniversary coverage of the September 11 attacks. He anchored “Facing Ground Zero: A Dateline Special,” an hour built from the NBC News archive and including never-before-seen images, on Friday, September 11, with Llamas anchoring from Ground Zero for “NBC Nightly News” and “Top Story.” The network also ran a “Cost of Denial” investigation on the evening news into the lasting health consequences of the attacks. Season 35 of “Dateline” — the 35th since its 1992 debut — premieres Friday, September 25 at 9 p.m.
The Stories That Defined a Decade
Brian Williams, the longtime broadcaster Holt replaced, had left the show amid criticism that he exaggerated his account of a helicopter attack in Iraq. NBC named Holt permanent anchor on June 18, 2015, after eight years fronting the weekend editions.
The 10 years that followed handed him the assignments that defined the era. Trump’s rise, the COVID pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the October 7, 2023 attack in Israel and the war in Gaza all reached viewers through coverage he fronted from the anchor desk. He also reported from towns wrecked by hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires and mass shootings. Trump sat down with him one-on-one, as did Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
From the Police Beat to Network News
Holt started out in radio, moving to San Francisco at 20 to work at a CBS station after chasing fire and police calls in Sacramento. He moved to television in 1981 as a reporter at WCBS-TV in New York, then headed to Los Angeles in 1982 to report for KNXT, now KCBS-TV. He returned to WCBS the next year. He then anchored the afternoon and evening newscasts at WBBM-TV in Chicago for 14 years.
NBC hired him in 2000. He co-anchored “Weekend TODAY” for 12 years and became principal anchor of “Dateline” in September 2011. His honors include Emmy Awards and, in 2019, the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.
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 Newscast for Kids
The assignments before the February 2025 announcement showed how wide his portfolio had grown. He co-anchored NBC’s 2024 election night coverage. An exclusive interview with President Masoud Pezeshkian drew him to Iran, and it aired on January 14, 2025, more than a year before the Israeli and American strikes on the country began. Four days before that interview he anchored “Fire & Ash: Devastation in L.A.,” an NBC News primetime special on the Los Angeles wildfires that ran in Dateline’s Friday slot and pushed the scheduled episode aside.
He also anchored “NBC Nightly News: Kids Edition,” a digital newscast for children nominated for a Children’s and Family Emmy in 2023.
“Before & After” offers listeners who followed him through hurricanes, elections and war zones something quieter than a national crisis: the single moment that rewrites one life. Holt has spent a career conducting that interview in the middle of chaos. Now it is the premise of a show carrying his name.