Dr. Jennifer Ashton is leaving ABC News.
The GMA3 co-host and ABC chief medical correspondent will depart the network in June when her contract ends.
Ashton says she made the decision to leave so that she could build out her new women’s wellness company, Ajenda, which she will lead as founder and CEO. The company — which launched with a newsletter in March — is focused on addressing the challenges of menopause health and weight management.
“I kind of subscribe to the fact that when the universe sends you a message, you should listen to it,” Ashton tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview. “I’ve been watching and participating in the steadily building upswell of interest of those two areas in our country and in our society and in our culture and media and in medicine and in science.
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“Sometimes an important message needs the right messenger, and I feel like there is no more critical time in this country for women’s health, and for weight management,” Ashton adds. “We’re facing an obesity epidemic, and menopause and perimenopause and women’s health is literally in a spotlight like never before. And I want to be the messenger for those messages. And so I’m excited about finally having the opportunity to just devote 100 percent of my time and effort into that, and using the skills that I’ve learned from being at the number one network for 13 years, I think are going to be really vital in that.”
Ashton says that she received vocal support from her fellow ABC anchors, as well as ABC News president Kim Godwin and Debra OConnell, who runs ABC’s news and networks division.
“They both said to me, ‘Is there anything we can do to change your mind?’ And when I said there really isn’t, because I really feel strongly about doing this, they basically said you know, ‘we’re going to be behind you.’ And I think that’s really unusual in this business in this day,” Ashton says.
“As one of the preeminent medical journalists of our time — or as we call her here at ABC, ‘America’s favorite doctor’ — Dr. Ashton has immeasurably contributed to ABC News as America’s #1 news network,” said OConnell in a statement. “She will always have a home at ABC, and we wish her only the best as she continues her unwavering advocacy of women’s health.”
“Dr. Ashton’s straight-forward, fact-based reporting has guided our audience — and the country — through some of the most significant health crises of the past decade, notably the COVID-19 pandemic, and she’s done so with poise, unfettered access to key health leaders and experts, and outstanding reporting that’s provided a road map to wellness for millions of our viewers,” added Godwin.
The journalist and MD (she is a board-certified OB/GYN and Obesity Medicine Specialist) has been with ABC News since 2012, and began hosting GMA3 in March of 2020 to help explain the emerging COVID-19 pandemic to viewers. She has stayed with the program since then, including as part of its relaunch last year alongside co-hosts Eva Pilgrim and DeMarco Morgan. That being said, while Ashton is leaving ABC, she does not expect to abandon TV altogether, noting her experience as a medical contributor to CBS News and Fox News.
“What I’ve conveyed to ABC is that they’re my family, and I’m not going anywhere. I’m not disappearing from television,” Ashton says. “It is a very powerful platform and medium, and I have been doing it at ABC for 13 years and at other networks for five years before that, and I plan to continue to do television in some shape or form. What that looks like is TBD. But I also feel like there are a lot of ways to reach people and television is one of them, but I want to do all of them.”
That will likely include video content developed by Ajenda, which is also exploring business lines like live online clinics for education, or meal-planning.
“This has always been my medical calling, but I really feel like I was in a position to leverage my communication ability and the platform that I have in these two areas,” Ashton says. “So who knows what it’ll evolve into, but I know that I like communicating about these topics. And so any way that I can do that I am interested in and everything’s on the table. It might be a podcast, it might be television, docuseries, anything.”
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