“Why did you leave your CNN show?” my friend Guy asked when we finally caught up after years apart. It was a question I’d answered countless times since stepping down in 2022, yet hearing it again, in that moment, it felt strangely fresh.
I understand why people are curious about why I left. Anchoring a prime-time newscast on CNN was one of those accomplishments that teenage me would have considered the epitome of journalistic success. In television journalism, some roles are almost always considered career highlights. In my case, my name in the show title added to the sense that I had reached some sort of Mount Everest of talking heads. “HALA GORANI TONIGHT,” the voiceover announced every evening as I settled into the anchor chair at 7 p.m., my list of guests and topics laid out on the glass desk in front of me. By any measure, I had “made it” in my field.
And yet.
And yet, sometime around the tail end of the COVID pandemic, I knew I was done. It wasn’t a decision I took lightly or quickly. That time felt almost like a marriage that had run its course: CNN and I still lived in the same house, but slept in separate bedrooms. A union sustained less by love than by the fear that if I left, there might not be anything better waiting on the other side. Shrinking show budgets, less field work, the grinding repetition of the news cycle: a combination of factors overlapped often enough on a daily basis that my love for evening news anchoring started to wane until I realised, after 23 years, that I wasn’t doing the kind of journalism that made me choose this profession in the first place.
I made sure I was financially stable (no children to put through school certainly gave me more financial flexibility), and I decided to hang up my news anchor jackets without regrets.
“The bravest career move is choosing truth over prestige,” Patti Smith once said. For me, it was a choice between creativity and freedom and ego. Once I knew I could live happily without having a platform like CNN attached to my name, that thing that kids today call a “personal brand,” the move was self-evident.
Of course, there was the delicate issue of losing that instantly recognisable three-letter logo from my job title, which opened doors and looked fancy on business cards. I also wouldn’t benefit from that fame-adjacent lifestyle that comes with being a television news anchor. I would stop being recognised, sought after and celebrated as a public figure.
In the end, losing that status didn’t matter nearly as much as I thought it would. The industry was changing, with social media revolutionising how young people consume news and diverting ad dollars from traditional broadcasters. I knew that to be truly happy in the next chapter of my professional life, I needed to go back to my love of covering people, not interviewing cabinet ministers; seeing, smelling, and hearing an event for myself, not reading about it from an air-conditioned studio.
In the years since leaving, I’ve reported for NBC News as a contributor from Jerusalem, Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, and London. I was nominated for top industry awards. I’ve written a book and magazine columns. Taking that leap hasn’t always been easy. Loving my job again has meant taking a painful pay cut and living with the uncertainty of being a freelancer in an industry undergoing massive cost-cutting.
As I was explaining all this to Guy, I thought again of how fortunate I felt to have been able to walk away. Fear keeps us from moving on in every aspect of life. I decided I wouldn’t let it.
“Do you ever regret leaving?” my friend asked when I shared that I’d been getting less work as newsrooms continue to shrink, with some of the very best journalists losing their jobs.
My answer came very quickly.
“Not for a second.”
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