Chelsea Clinton to Leave Well-Paid NBC News Job

Posted by Unknown on Friday, August 29, 2014

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Politics |Chelsea Clinton to Leave NBC News

http://nyti.ms/1wOW9ZB

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 decided to depart NBC News to focus on her philanthropic work at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. This fall, she and her husband, Marc Mezvinsky, also are expecting their first child. At the same time, her mother, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is mulling another presidential bid in 2016.

â€œI am profoundly grateful to NBC viewers who responded to the stories I shared,â€ wrote Ms. Clinton, whose reports were part of NBC Newsâ€™s â€œMaking a Differenceâ€ series. Those reports were often in line with the charitable work Ms. Clinton does at the Clinton Foundation.

Ms. Clintonâ€™s tenure at the news outlet had been a rocky one, less because of the feel-good reports she delivered on camera than because of her evolution from a media-shy first daughter to 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 â€œTodayâ€ show, drawing similar criticism.)

Chelsea Clinton with NBC News anchor Brian Williams in 2011. Peter Kramer/NBC

Ms. Clinton, who is vice chairwoman of the philanthropy her father founded, made an annual salary of $600,000 at NBC, according to Politico. She remains on the board of IAC/InterActive Corporation, the digital media company overseen by Barry Diller, a long-time Clinton supporter. In 2011, that position paid an annual retainer of $50,000 and a $250,000 grant of restricted stock.

More recently, Ms. Clintonâ€™s affiliation with NBC News had been seen as a potential conflict as her mother embarked on a nationwide book tour that had the trappings of a precursor to a presidential campaign. It was during Mrs. Clintonâ€™s hard-fought 2008 Democratic primary against then-Senator Barack Obama that her daughter emerged as a more public figure hitting the stump on behalf of her mother.

While Chelsea Clintonâ€™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. â€œItâ€™s hard to get stories like this told on a platform as big as NBC Nightly News,â€ 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 with Deborah Turness, a British news executive, recently stepping 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 â€œWe look forward to working with her in the future.â€