Brooke Baldwin’s job is everything a journalist dreams about. She has met with presidents, and interviewed first ladies, members of Congress, astronauts, scientists, and activists. She has traveled the country and world covering everything from natural disasters to terrorist attacks. On a slow news day, she might enjoy a little light banter with actors and rock stars. But Baldwin doesn’t let any of this get to her head. “I’m a Southern girl,” she tells me. “So I grew up with the saying: ‘You best not get too big for your britches.’”
Baldwin’s southern sensibility also doesn’t allow her to take anything for granted. “I’m privileged to have a front row seat to history and grateful to have a platform that allows me to engage in difficult dialogue, and to listen and observe,” she says. It’s a Friday afternoon in March and I’m speaking with Baldwin via Zoom from her CNN office in New York City. Wearing a T-shirt that’s emblazoned with Stevie Nicks, she looks a lot more casual than I’m used to seeing her on television. Her weekday show, CNN Newsroom with Brooke Baldwin, airs in the middle of the afternoon when news often breaks, so she’s frequently on camera experiencing historic moments with the rest of us in real time. So when Baldwin looks down at her phone a couple of times, saying “I’m sorry, my phone is blowing up,” I think, It must be breaking news, and perk up in my seat. But not exactly. “I had a crazy dream of a day last week guest-hosting The Ellen Show and it’s airing as we speak, so I’m getting tons of messages,” she laughs.
In reality, Baldwin has been living her dream since 2008. “I was born and raised in Atlanta,” she says, where CNN is headquartered. “For as long as I can remember, all I ever wanted was to be a CNN anchor and have this unique window to the world.” Some of her assignments have certainly been out there. “When I was covering the 2016 election, I interviewed the group Bikers For Trump in Ohio, where I found myself riding on the back of a Harley Davidson emblazoned with TRUMP,” she says. “Later, when I was assigned to cover Trump’s motorcade at his inauguration, I was stationed on the back of a moving flatbed truck a couple of feet away from his limo.” Hanging out on musician Willie Nelson’s tour bus was a dream come true and so was creating her digital series American Woman for CNN a few years ago. For two seasons, she sat down with a succession of trailblazing women, including voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg.
Brooke Baldwin interviewing Voting Rights Activist Stacey Abrams for American Woman Season 2.
With a career like that, it’s no wonder many viewers were thrown for a loop when Baldwin abruptly announced on air in February that she would host her final newscast on April 16. “It was a painful moment when I made the decision because working for the network has been my calling for so many years,” Baldwin tells me.
Even as far back as 2001, when she graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was certain she would one day call the network home. “I knew in my bones that I was going to be a journalist and that one day I would work at CNN,” she says. Baldwin felt like an anomaly among her sorority sisters who had a more relaxed approach to their futures. “They were more like ‘Oh, we might do this or we might do that,’” she says. “Their plan was to more or less wing it in New York and live a Sex and the City kind of life.” But if Baldwin was going to be on TV, she knew she would have to head in another direction, so she made her way to the stepping stone city of Charlottesville, Virginia working at a small news station.
At first, she found the industry less welcoming than she hoped. “I grew up watching Oprah Winfrey, Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, and Katie Couric,” she tells me. “All of these women had already broken the glass ceiling in television, so I naively assumed the door was wide open for women in this field. I thought there would be this huge support system with tons of women in newsrooms and that I would go out into the TV world and crush it. But it was so not like that.” Instead, Baldwin found that like many white collar jobs, journalism was largely male-dominated (“and still is,” she adds). “There was a scarcity mentality among women who felt they needed to be ambitious and focused on landing the few available spots to us,” Baldwin explains.
Brooke Baldwin with First Lady Laura Bush.
In Charlottesville, when Baldwin was assigned to the prized beat of Albemarle County—“the biggest county”—she was thrilled. “I was excited for the chance to report on crimes, court cases and property disputes,” Baldwin says. But before she could begin reporting in earnest, the beat was snatched away. “The rumor was that a female colleague of mine had gone behind my back and convinced the bosses that the spot should be hers,” she says. Baldwin was blindsided and furious, not because she felt she deserved the job more, but because she felt there should have been room for both women. “I wish she had just come to me,” Baldwin says. “We could have worked something out like splitting the beat as partners or we could have rotated on and off.”
In hindsight, Baldwin can better see why her colleague did what she did. “It was a response to an environment in which we were both struggling to be seen and heard,” she says. “But that was the beginning of my ‘Oh man, this isn’t going to be as girlie kumbaya as I thought it was going to be.’ It knocked me back a little—and probably in a good way because I needed to develop some thicker skin to prepare myself for the next few years.”
On the cusp of turning 30, Baldwin moved back to her childhood home in Atlanta to pursue her singular lifelong desire: working at the one and only CNN. “I had spent the previous eight years scraping for airtime in Virginia, West Virginia and Washington DC.,” she says. “I had lived alone in tiny apartments—at one point with my baby brother, and other points bunking with sympathetic friends.” Baldwin’s plan was to move back home and freelance her way into a stable job with the network. “I did a lot of hustling and started working for the network two days a week. One day I could be thrown into a story about gun laws changing in Georgia and the next day I’d anchor international news at 2 a.m.,” she says. “But I would show up every day to put my name on a Post-It note on a temporary office door. I was trying to convince myself that I owned the place when I so didn’t,” she says laughing.
Brooke Baldwin interviewing filmmaker Ava DuVernay for her book, Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power.
But after working her “ass off for a year,” nothing permanent was coming through. “I had left a decent job in D.C. for this,” she says. “I was trying to move my career forward but it felt more like a step backwards; I was very discouraged.” But that wasn’t the whole story. “My boyfriend of three years had recently cheated on me and I felt so defeated that I took him back—which only added to the indignity of the situation.” And for the kicker: the boyfriend also happened to have a full-time job at CNN. “Every single day, I jealously watched him clock into the life I wanted.”
The drama was too much to bear. “One day I slumped into the yellow chair in my mom’s bedroom and cried my eyes out,” Baldwin says. “I’m not a quitter, but that was the closest I came to quitting my pursuit of my dream job. I was just so tired of all the clawing.” That moment was also the culmination of the loneliness of her twenties, she says. But Baldwin’s mother talked her out of quitting. “I’m grateful I had the advice and soft landing of my mother’s support—especially at a time when her marriage of forty years to my dad was also dissolving,” Baldwin remembers. “She also may have consoled me with some Disney lyrics,” she laughs.
As her fairytale would have it, just a few weeks later, Baldwin got a call to be the fill-in anchor for the weekends. She also started serving as a part-time correspondent in the studio to Rick’s List, a hit news and commentary show hosted by Rick Sanchez. About a year later, when she was just 31 years old, Baldwin would be offered the full-time anchor spot. As she says: “The rest is history.”
Brooke Baldwin at the 2016 Inauguration.
The job has been everything she has wanted it to be, and then some. “I spent much of 2015 and 2016 covering the wildest presidential election we reporters thought we would ever see in our lifetime—until 2020 rolled around,” she says dryly. “I’ve also covered the pandemic and had COVID myself in April last year.” A decade in the anchor’s seat has also changed her as a person: “I’ve reported on far too many school shootings, but I’ve also become friends with some of the survivors,” she says.
Even though CNN has been a huge part of her life for so long, Baldwin believes the time has come to move on. “Dreams change,” she says. “When I interviewed all of those amazing women for American Woman, they weren’t the kind of women who were just going to sit there and be interviewed,” Baldwin tells me. “They would say: ‘Okay, tell me about you. What makes you tick and tell me about your platform.’ It did something to my soul and it led to some really deep inward thinking and dialogue. That was when I started to realize that CNN perhaps wasn’t my calling anymore. It was a little scary.”
Baldwin has been pursuing another passion behind the scenes: on April 6 she will be releasing her book, Huddle: How Women Unlock Their Collective Power, about the power women can possess when they join forces. “Over the last five years in the background of all the breaking news, I’ve noticed a growing phenomenon of women in politics, activist circles, sports, Hollywood and many other walks of life coming together to incite meaningful change in their fields,” she says. “I chose the word ‘huddle’ to describe these groups of women because it’s essentially a masculine word: we automatically think of men strategizing and motivating each other on a football field. I wanted to flip the word on its head, and for women to feminize and own the word.”
Over the course of doing American Woman and writing the book Baldwin says she realized that she can’t be in the same space as these amazing women and not be the best possible version of herself. “But I’ll be the first to admit that I have no idea what this next version of me will look like,” she laughs. “Whatever I do, I know it’s going to involve diving into the deep end of storytelling, and having more time and space with extraordinary Americans.” She says that could involve writing another book or creating content on a network. “It might even mean doing a talk show,” she tells me. Sounds like CNN might have some new competition.
