As Judy Woodruff prepares to sign-off, PBS Newshour announces new anchors

Judy Woodruff recently announced she will be stepping aside from the PBS NewsHour anchor desk.

Woodruff’s distinguished career spans five decades in journalism, including 25 years as part of public broadcasting. She has solo-anchored the NewsHour since 2016 and served as a rotating anchor for the broadcast from 2009 – 2013. Woodruff first joined what was then known as the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, as chief Washington correspondent in 1983, and is the recipient of countless top journalism awards including the Peabody Award for Journalistic Integrity and the Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award, 

Sharon Rockefeller, President and CEO of WETA and President of NewsHour Productions, today named PBS NewsHour chief correspondent Amna Nawaz and chief Washington correspondent and PBS News Weekend anchor Geoff Bennett co-anchors of the nightly newscast. The PBS NewsHour, co-anchored by Nawaz and Bennett, will launch on Monday, January 2, 2023. Nawaz and Bennett succeed Judy Woodruff, who has solo-anchored PBS’s nightly news broadcast since 2016, prior to which she co-anchored it alongside the late Gwen Ifill.

Bennett has reported from the White House under three presidents and has covered five presidential elections. He joined NewsHour in 2022 from NBC News, where he was a White House correspondent and substitute anchor for MSNBC. In his prior experience, he worked for NPR — beginning as an editor for Weekend Edition and later as a reporter covering Congress and the White House. An Edward R. Murrow Award recipient, Bennett began his journalism career at ABC News’ World News Tonight.

Read the full article at https://www.pbs.org/newshour/press-releases/amna-nawaz-and-geoff-bennett-named-co-anchors-of-pbs-newshour
PBS NewsHour hosts Geoff Bennett and Amna Nawaz, photographed 10 November 2022, in Alexandria VA. Photo by Mike Morgan.

In 2023-2024, Woodruff will embark on a new reporting project, Judy Woodruff Presents: America at a Crossroads.

The effort will explore how America arrived at this fractured political state and what solutions people envision, through travel and conversations with voters and local and national politicians, as well as discussions with writers, historians, religious and community leaders, and policy experts. As a senior correspondent, she will report regularly for this series on the NewsHour.