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Veteran TV journalist Linda Ellerbee announced Tuesday that she's retiring at the end of this year, after 44 years in the business.
Ellerbee, 71, anchored NBC News Overnight in the 1980s, and currently helms Nickelodeon's Nick News with Linda Ellerbee, which has aired for 25 years and holds the record for television's longest-running children's news show. Prior to landing her NBC job, Ellerbee worked in the Dallas bureau of The Associated Press, and later at CBS television affiliates in Houston and New York. After Overnight was canceled in 1986, Ellerbee moved to ABC, where she won an Emmy in 1987 for her writing on Our World, a weekly historical series.
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To date, Nick News has won three Peabody Awards and 10 Emmys. In 2011, Ellerbee was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award for Children's Television at the Banff International Media Festival. The titular character played by Candice Bergen on Murphy Brown is reportedly modeled on her.
Ellerbee is also a prolific author, having published three memoirs as well as Get Real, a children's book series about two middle school girls who start a school newspaper.
"I'm a lucky woman," Ellerbee said in a statement. "I saw the world, met many of the world's most interesting people and was well paid to do so. Now I choose to go, and I go smiling. I've had a great time."
Ellerbee will officially retire after Hello, I Must Be Going!, an hour-long retrospective of Nick News with Linda Ellerbee, airs on Nickelodeon on Tuesday, Dec. 15 at 8/7c.