Chelsea Clinton to Leave Well-Paid NBC News Job
Less than three years after
she embarked on a new and lucrative career as an NBC News special
correspondent, Chelsea Clinton said on Friday that she would leave that
position.
In a letter posted on her Facebook
page, Ms. Clinton said she had decided to depart NBC News to focus on
philanthropic work at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. She
and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, are also expecting their first child this
fall. At the same time, her mother, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is mulling a
presidential bid in 2016.
“I am profoundly grateful to NBC
viewers who responded to the stories I shared,” wrote Ms. Clinton, whose
reports were part of NBC News’s “Making a Difference” series. Those reports
were often in line with the charitable work Ms. Clinton does at the Clinton
Foundation.
Ms. Clinton’s
tenure at the news outlet was not a smooth one, less because of her feel-good
reports than because a media-shy first daughter was hired as a television
journalist earning a six-figure salary. (In 2009, NBC News hired Jenna Bush Hager, a daughter
of former President George W. Bush, as a special correspondent for the “Today”
show, drawing similar criticism.)
Ms. Clinton, who is vice chairwoman
of the philanthropic organization her father founded, made an annual salary of
$600,000 at NBC, according to Politico. She remains on the board of
IAC/InterActiveCorp, the digital media company overseen by Barry Diller, a
longtime Clinton supporter. In 2011, that position paid an annual retainer of
$50,000 and a $250,000 grant of restricted stock.
More recently, Ms. Clinton’s
affiliation with NBC News had been seen as a potential conflict as her mother
embarked on a nationwide book tour that looked like the precursor to a
presidential campaign. It was during Hillary Clinton’s hard-fought 2008
Democratic primary against then Senator Barack Obama that her daughter emerged
as a more public figure, stumping for her mother.
While Chelsea Clinton’s NBC segments
did not attract particularly large audiences, news executives and her subjects
said her celebrity brought outsize attention to the communities and nonprofits
she profiled. “It’s hard to get stories like this told on a platform as big as
‘NBC Nightly News,’ “ said Josh Wachs, chief strategy officer at Share Our
Strength, a nonprofit that fights childhood hunger.
A number of media outlets talked to
Ms. Clinton before she decided to sign with NBC News in December 2011. Since
then the network has experienced a management shift; Deborah Turness, a British
news executive, recently stepped in as president. Not long ago, Ms. Clinton
switched to a contract that allowed her to exit.
In a statement, Alex Wallace, senior
vice president of NBC News, said, “While she will be missed, we look forward to
working with her in the future.”
Correction: August 29, 2014
A previous version of this article
misstated the name of the digital media company overseen by Barry Diller. It is
IAC/InterActiveCorp, not IAC/InterActive Corporation.
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