Alisyn Camerota made a name for herself with years of hard-won experience on Fox News Channel and CNN. These days, she says, “I’m playing by different rules.”
Camerota, who left CNN at the end of 2024, has joined Scripps News as a special events anchor, and is about to launch a new six-episode series for the streaming outlet. “Connected with Alisyn Camerota” presents in-depth half hour interviews with people who have been caught in interesting, even emotionally draining situations. Among her guests: former CNN colleague Don Lemon; Everclear frontman Art Alexakis; Judge Esther Salas, the federal judge whose only child was killed in a targeted attack; and Gabby Giffords, the former U.S. representative from Arizona who was seriously wounded by a gunman in 2011.
The show premieres on Friday, March 27, at 8 p.m. Jon Leiberman, a veteran media producer, correspondent and executive who’s previously held roles with CNN, “America’s Most Wanted” and SiriusXM, and Alexandra Zuckerman, Scripps News’ director of operations and specials, will serve as the show’s executive producers.
“People are hungry to peel back the curtain to see somebody’s true self. And so the people that we’ve booked, the guests for this first season, are all people who you certainly are familiar with, but you don’t necessarily know the breadth of their backstory,” Camerota says. “I get to conduct kind of an unfiltered, uninterrupted, 30-minute conversation where we go there. These are, I think, the deepest, the deepest conversations I’ve ever had on TV.”
Scripps News adds Camerota’s program to its lineup as the parent company sees opportunity in free, ad-supported streaming. With Camerota, they get a veteran who has worked in several very different parts of the industry, and has earned a reputation as a steadfast interviewer who can handle tough exchanges as well as lighter ones. At CNN, she held her own opposite the garrulous anchor Chris Cuomo in the morning and even worked in primetime as the Warner Bros. Discovery network experimented with evening formats.
Lemon will speak on his exit from CNN and his recent arrest by the U.S. Department of Justice for covering a Minnesota protest against ICE. Alexakis discussed his struggles with multiple sclerosis.
Camerota is likely to prove an empathetic interviewer. Her husband, Tim Lewis, died in 2024 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, and Camerota in her last year with CNN took time to care for him. She has also seen her kids go off to college while looking for a path in a media industry that is in rapid flux. “In the past 18 months, there’s been the depths of despair and there’s been some pockets and moments of joy,” she says. “And I’m just learning that that’s kind of the duality that I will live with now.”
She’s bringing her recent experience to the show. “One of the hallmarks of journalism is that you are not part of the story, you take yourself out of the story. And with everything that I’ve gone through over the past 18 months, people come into the interview, even acquaintances, you know, people who I don’t, I’m not friends with. And they hug me and are like, how are you? And I allow myself to be right there with them,” she says. “Grief comes up a lot in this first season. There are a lot of people who have suffered grief, some of them very publicly, and I’m very interested in how they got through it, what coping mechanisms they can share with me, with the viewers. And so I don’t I don’t try to insert myself in the story, but nor am I kind of militant about keeping myself out of the story.”
Like other anchors and video journalists, Camerota sees how traditional news content is changing as more people gravitate toward podcasts and new forms of interviews. “The positive side is we don’t have to be anchors in our ivory tower, just, you know, being sort of this voice of God and being completely impassive and stoic. And we are allowed to connect more, and I think that people appreciate that,” she says. “On the downside, the blurring of lines and the loosening of rules has left a lot of people confused about what’s journalism.”
Still, this is going to be a news program, says Camerota. “Nobody will be confused about what this show is,” she adds. “Viewers get to be a fly on the wall for a deeper conversation than they’re used to.”
