ABC World News anchor Charlie Gibson announced to his colleagues today that he’ll step down at the end of the year. ABC has announced that Diane Sawyer will replace him.
In Gibson’s letter to World News staff, he said he’s retiring from full time employment at ABC News — his professional home for nearly 35 years — but may still contribute occasionally. “I love this news department, and all who work in it, to the depths of my soul,” Gibson wrote.
In 2006, Gibson took over the anchor chair that the late Peter Jennings had kept stable for more than two decades. Gibson got the job after Jennings’ briefly-tenured co-anchor replacements, Bob Woodruff and Elizabeth Vargas, were sidelined by an unusual confluence of events: his brain injury suffered covering the war in Iraq, and her pregnancy.
Sawyer, a veteran of 60 Minutes, Primetime Live and Good Morning America, will take over in January.
