TV journalism pioneer Linda Ellerbee retiring after 44 years in news

Maria Puente | USA TODAY

Linda Ellerbee, the veteran TV journalist who described her career as split between announcing the news for adults and later explaining the news to children, is signing off for good, she announced Tuesday.

Ellerbee said she would retire from TV in January, 44 years after her first journalism job.

Outspoken, wry, whip-smart, and a Texan, Ellerbee, 71, was one of the few prominent women in early TV journalism, and was thought to be a model for Candice Bergen's award-winning sitcom character, the outspoken Murphy Brown. She even guest-starred on the series three times.

“I don’t know if Murphy is based on me, and don’t much care, but a series about a television news anchorwoman whose mouth constantly gets her into trouble? What’s not to like?” Ellerbee said in a statement.

Ellerbee knew all about gender discrimination in TV news and was able to talk about it with her characteristically irreverent sense of humor. “If men can run the world, why can’t they stop wearing neckties?,” she once wondered.

She is a best-selling author of amusing memoirs, a sought-after speaker, a breast cancer survivor, mom, grandmother, and "one more proud, loud, storytelling Texan.”

Linda Ellerbe is retiring from Nick News. She has had the coolest career. https://t.co/qkkPDA5GNb — Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) December 1, 2015

“I’m a lucky woman,” she said. “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. And thank you for asking, but, no, I don’t intend to mellow.”

Nickelodeon, where Ellerbee has spent the latter half of her career, will air the final edition of Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: “Hello, I Must Be Going!”, an hour-long retrospective of the series, on Dec. 15.

"It's really nice to be one of the few who walks away from television news on their own time and of their own choice and I'm really lucky in that," she said. "That really didn't happen for so many of my contemporaries, didn't happen because of age or cutbacks in news."

Ellerbee is best known for anchoring and writing the late-night news program, NBC News Overnight, in the early 1980s, and later the children’s news and documentary series, Nick News with Linda Ellerbee, produced by her company, Lucky Duck Productions. Airing for 25 years on Nickelodeon, it's TV’s longest running children’s news show.

But she was never really a social-media hound. She joined Twitter in April 2011 but her first tweet was her last.

Okay. This is my first Tweet. Now what? — Linda Ellerbee (@linda_ellerbee) April 18, 2011

Ellerbee began her TV news career after she was fired by The Associated Press in 1972, after one of those nightmare journalistic screw-ups: On the night desk in Dallas, she wrote a gossipy personal letter and accidentally sent it out on the national newswire.

“I was fired,” says Ellerbee, “only because the AP lawyers told my bosses they couldn’t shoot me, which they all thought was a better idea.” But a news director at Houston's KHOU-TV saw the letter, thought Ellerbee was a funny writer, and hired her.

Ellerbee moved on to local news in New York and then NBC, where she covered politics and co-hosted the prime-time newsmagazine Weekend with Lloyd Dobyns. She hosted weekly news segments on the Today show and, later, Good Morning America.

Her network news highlight was a cult favorite even though it was in the middle of the night. She and Dobyns wrote and co-hosted the nightly news program Overnight from 1984 to 1986 on NBC, honored by the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards as "possibly the best-written and most intelligent news program ever."

"There's never been anything plastic or blow-dried about Linda," Cheryl Gould, a creator and senior broadcast producer on Overnight, told the AP. ''She has always been the antithesis of your stereotypical, perfectly coiffed anchorwoman. Her emotions are not manufactured for the on-air effect. Linda is as real as they come."

Ellerbee's 1986 book, And So it Goes — named for her signature sign-off — was climbing the best-seller lists when she was told by her unamused NBC bosses that her contract would not be renewed.

Eventually, the new kids' network Nickelodeon asked her to produce a show explaining to children the U.S. war with Iraq in the early 1990s. Later, she produced shows — and won multiple Emmys — on the 2001 terrorist attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, Hurricane Katrina, same-sex marriage, AIDS, children living with alcoholics, and children living with and dying of cancer.

"The days are long past, if they ever existed, where kids live in some happy little childhood protected by elves and fairies," she said.

The network isn't replacing Ellerbee, but promised to continue a dialogue with viewers on current issues.

Ellerbee says she never thought of herself a maverick.

“I thought I was normal; other people were a little weird. But if not doing everything the way everybody else did makes me a maverick, what the hell? Only dead fish swim with the stream all the time.”

When asked what she planned to after she retired, Ellerbee said she was thinking of becoming a shepherd.

Contributing: The Associated Press