After more than 40 years at NPR, including stints hosting both Morning Edition and All Things Considered, Renee Montagne says it's time for something else.
"I had hit a moment where rather than doing an enormous amounts of output, I was doing less and less," she said. "In a way, I had done so many things already. I never had a 'beat'. So I sort of hit this moment where I couldn't quite figure out what stories I want to do."
Montagne started out in the early 1980's at a community station, working with poets and musicians, while attending the University of California at Berkeley.
"I didn't actually have a big career in mind," she explained. "And I have very close friends (at NPR) who had little radio shows when they were 10 years old in the basement."
But Montagne was named the news person at that station, finding lots of opportunities for stories in San Francisco, teaching herself as she went along. A former colleague at Pacific News Service, which distributed material to small stations, ended up later hiring her at NPR.
"Freelancing, doing stories in New York City for NPR, I was love with it," she said. "It was an adventure, and eventually, kind of a mission."
Montagne is not sure what the next chapter will look like, but in her last week at the network, she talked about changes in broadcast journalism over the years.
Looking back thirty years or more, Montagne recalls a time when reporters didn't have to worry about taking photos for the web, and the radio portion included splicing reel-to-reel tape.
Besides her time hosting, she covered Nelson Mandela in South Africa, including his inauguration in 1994. "It would be twenty-four to thirty-six hours (to get story on) because it had to be mailed to the mailed to the BBC," she explained. "I never took a picture of Mandela, in the very early days when you were close to him."
She also took 10 reporting trips to Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001, which she calls “dramatically important.”
Her last major project was a yearlong collaboration with ProPublica reporter Nina Martin. "Lost Mothers" looked at the alarming rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. as compared to other developed countries. It won more than a dozen honors, including a Peabody award, and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.
With her retirement from NPR, Montagne said it is possible a book could be in her future.
"I'll have time to play with the idea, and take a risk." she said. "I have files - cause I never throw anything away."