Nick News‘ Linda Ellerbee Is Retiring

Linda Ellerbee, the woman who educated you while you were searching for cartoons, is retiring. The longtime host of Nick News will be stepping down this month, the Associated Press reports. Nickelodeon will honor Ellerbee with a retrospective on December 15. "It's really nice to be one of the few who walks away from television news on their own time and of their own choice and I'm really lucky in that," Ellerbee told the AP. "That really didn't happen for so many of my contemporaries, didn't happen because of age or cutbacks in news." She said: "I go smiling." Ellerbee wasn't always in the business of informing kids. As the AP recounts, she worked for programs including NBC's Weekend and Overnight, and contributed to Today and Good Morning America. Her work with Nickelodeon began when she was hired to host a special on the Gulf War, and her topics wouldn't get less serious from there: She dealt with subjects ranging from AIDS to 9/11. "Our shows are told through the voices of the people in them," Ellerbee told BuzzFeed for a 2013 story about the history of Nick News. People who were influenced by Ellerbee are paying tribute to her career on Twitter.