diane-rehm.jpg

Diane Rehm, longtime talk show host on NPR.

(PD file)

NPR talk show host Diane Rehm, 79, plans to retire, according to WAMU, the NPR member station where her daily show is produced in Washington, D.C.

But her exit, after more than 30 years, will not be immediate, and no date has been set, according to NPR. She is expected to continue through the 2016 elections, almost a year away.

"Diane, WAMU and NPR are working together closely on what comes next, and we are in active conversations about WAMU's plans for a successor program for the public radio morning audience," WAMU General Manager J.J. Yore said in a statement about the plans.

Her show is heard in Northeast Ohio on WCPN FM/90.3 from 10 a.m. to noon weekdays.

"It is wildly popular with our audience," said Mary Grace Herrington, chief development officer of WCPN parent ideastream. "We're going to hang in as long as she does.

"If she comes up with something new, we're going to work with her on that," she said, noting Rehm is considering options including a speaker series and a podcast.

Rehm has hosted her show, and sometimes has been forced to take time from it, while fighting spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological condition diagnosed in the late 1990s, which caused her speech to become strained and quavery. Various treatments have helped the condition, which she wrote about in her book "Finding My Voice."

She will go on a book tour in 2016 to support her upcoming memoir, "On My Own," about the death of her husband of 54 years from Parkinson's disease in 2014, and her life afterward.

A Washington native, Rehm didn't start her career until 37, first as a volunteer, then as an assistant producer for talk shows at WAMU. She topped 100 other applicants to become host of WAMU's morning "Kaleidoscope" in 1979. It was renamed "The Diane Rehm Show" five years later and started national distribution in 1995.