KABC news anchor Ellen Leyva to retire

News anchor Ellen Leyva is leaving KABC-TV Channel 7 aft astir 30 years, marking the latest departure of a salient section newscaster.

Leyva made the announcement Monday during the Walt Disney Co. station’s day program. She plans to stay connected the air, alongside longtime co-anchor David Ono, for a fewer much months during a transition, presumption officials said.

“After overmuch contemplation and introspection, I cognize I’m acceptable to marque a determination connected and absorption connected my adjacent large escapade successful life,” Leyva told viewers, adding that the determination was “something I’ve been reasoning astir for a agelong time.”

In an email to the staff, KABC General Manager Wendy Granato called Leyva’s status “bittersweet news.”

The Glendale-based presumption has agelong boasted 1 of the astir stable on-air teams successful Los Angeles. Its anchors stay fashionable with viewers adjacent arsenic quality depletion patterns alteration and stations go less lucrative divisions for the large networks. Last spring, a Pew Research Center study highlighted the industrywide shift, noting that a increasing fig of Americans get overmuch of their section quality online.

Still, an overwhelming bulk of respondents said section quality sum is important to their community, according to the Pew study.

And section broadcasters demonstrated their mettle — and importance — by providing marathon sum of past month’s Altadena and Pacific Palisades wildfires and the devastating aftermath arsenic thousands grieved the nonaccomplishment of loved ones, homes, churches, schools and businesses.

Leyva is the latest section quality anchor to exit.

Popular KNBC-TV Channel 4 meteorologist Fritz Coleman retired successful 2020. Two years later, a cadre of salient KNBC journalists — Beverly White, Chuck Henry, Kim Baldonado and Angie Crouch — retired from the station. Also successful 2022, longtime favourite Lynette Romero switched to KNBC aft a high-profile departure from KTLA-TV Channel 5.

And past year, 2 deaths stunned the section broadcast community: KTLA’s stalwart amusement anchor Sam Rubin, who died successful May; and KCAL-TV Channel 9 co-anchor Chauncy Glover, who died unexpectedly successful November astatine the property of 39.

Leyva, who grew up successful Arizona, joined KABC successful 1995 arsenic a wellness newsman and aboriginal joined the anchor desk.

Over the years, she has co-hosted Oscars reddish carpet arrivals, flown with the Blue Angels and provided a dependable on-air presence. She besides served arsenic KABC’s squad person for AIDS Walk Los Angeles and advocated for intelligence wellness services for underserved communities.

“To accidental that she has been an invaluable and genuinely treasured subordinate of our Eyewitness News squad is an understatement,” Granato said successful her email.

The presumption did not specify Leyva’s departure date.

“This station, everyone who works present and each of you are genuinely my location distant from home,” Leyva told viewers. “I could not person asked for a much rewarding vocation with the champion radical successful the champion metropolis successful the world.”