On December 8, 2024, veteran TV journalist (and Westport resident!) Alisyn Camerota made a surprise announcement on her Instagram: it would be her last day as an anchor on CNN, where she had worked for a decade. “It felt like I’d gotten everything that I could out of broadcast journalism,” Alisyn tells Westport Lifestyle. “I felt like I had gotten the brass ring. I would say, if a genie made me the host of the TODAY show—which to me was the pinnacle of the career—would I be excited and would I take it? When the answer is not really, then it’s time for something different.”
The announcement was a shock to longtime fans of Alisyn’s work, which included 16 years at Fox News and 10 at CNN. Alisyn had always wanted to be a broadcast journalist, something she wrote about in her 2024 memoir Combat Love. “I was sitting on the sofa at 15 years old, and I saw Phil Donahue running around his studio with a microphone,” she says. “It looked so interesting, so relevant, so exciting, so successful. I was a kid who was looking for all of those things— it was a eureka moment. From that point on, [a career in broadcast journalism] was my North Star.” Alisyn went to American University, where she majored in broadcast journalism and worked at the campus TV station. “From that minute, I had a microphone in my hands,” she says. “I had that thing people describe as a runner’s high— I had such an adrenaline rush from being at a scene and reporting what I was seeing and hearing.” She began her career with Ted Koppel after graduating, then worked for America's Most Wanted, an NBC morning show called REALlife, and local stations in Boston and Providence, R.I. before landing at FOX News Channel. There, she anchored some of FOX News’ highest-rated programs (America’s News Headquarters, Fox & Friends Weekend), before leaving for a role at CNN where she worked on some of their top shows as well (CNN New Day, CNN Newsroom, CNN Tonight). “It was the perfect career path for me,” Alisyn says. “I feel very grateful to have found it so early and to have had such success.”
So what spurred her change of heart? Two days after announcing she was leaving CNN, Alisyn shared more, alongside a makeup-free selfie in her bathrobe. “This is what it looks like when one of life’s earthquakes destroys your foundation,” she wrote. “You rebuild, even while still sifting through the rubble.” It was clear: this was bigger than just a career change. In July of last year, Alisyn’s husband of nearly 23 years, Tim Lewis, passed away two years after being diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. “I had this incredibly wonderful marriage to this super human being. And he passed away in July, which is not anything that anybody my age ever plans for,” she says. “Suddenly I was a solo parent of three teenagers. I didn’t have the playbook for that. And at that same time, I was already looking at broadening my horizons away from traditional broadcast news, because, as I said, it wasn't as soul-satisfying anymore. So I was already trying to figure out what that looked like. That felt like time for a reinvention.”
So, that’s what she called it. And that’s where she is now: in the midst of a reinvention. In January, she launched a Substack, which has already amassed more than 6,000 subscribers. “It’s really exciting, because you do get the instantaneous gratification of people tuning in and interacting with you,” she says. “They can tell you what they’d like you to dive deeper on, and you can tell them what is tickling your fancy. I’ve never had that before— I wasn’t able to see that level of engagement on conventional broadcast news. You don’t get that kind of feedback.”
She also loves how being on an independent platform allows her to shed the confines of TV news. “In my evolution, I started to feel that sometimes the interview subjects and viewers do want a connection [with the reporter], and that’s not the rules of broadcast journalism. I was starting to crave peeling back the curtain.” So you might find her musing on what inspires her, or co-anchoring alongside her former colleague (and fellow Westporter) Dave Briggs. “Westport is such a great place with so many inspirational people around,” she says. “There are journalists, authors, businesspeople, women who are starting their own businesses. I have an incredible posse of supportive friends who are not only cheering me on but giving me tons of advice and suggestions, and I love that about Westport.” She says that she and Tim originally moved to Westport because it was “the only town we could agree on” when they were planning to leave N.Y.C. The community ended up being perfect for them, which she says struck her when thinking about a recent event she put on at the Westport Library about the state of journalism with John Berman, a former CNN colleague, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Dave Briggs, Dan Woog. “I was thinking: it is so cool that we did this standing-room only event. Do other towns do this? Or is that just really special for us?”
Alisyn’s reinvention is far from over (that’s the beauty of a reinvention, of course— it’s ongoing and evolving). She says it will continue to involve growing her Substack, parenting her three kids, being an active member of the Westport community, and looking forward. “I have a lot of gratification for having fulfilled my dream,” she says. “I can tell that 15-year-old girl that she did it.” And she is, in fact, still doing it. “I still get that sparkly feeling whenever I do a live on Substack or post something that people respond to. I’ve been very comforted to know that it still happens whenever that red light goes on.”
Subscribe to Alisyn’s Substack at alisyncamerota.substack.com or follow her @alisyncamerota.