Carol Lin is the author of the new memoir When News Breaks: A Memoir of Love and War. She was a longtime anchor and correspondent for CNN and ABC News, and she lives in Hawaii.
Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir?
A: I actually started to write When News Breaks shortly after I left CNN in 2008 at the urging of friends and colleagues who thought I had a special story of love and loss. I set the early pages aside when I met Mike, whom you meet in the book.
After all, one of the gifts of writing a memoir is immersing yourself in all the emotions and experiences of a past great, first love, if you will. That wouldn't be fair to the person who wanted to explore something new together.
All these years later, my daughter is a young adult going through her first heartbreak and the same big decisions about career and identity that had shaped me. I see the pressure she feels to be perfect, and the way she and her peers' curate their lives on social media.
I said to myself, it's time to share my story, all my insecurity, desire, shame, the mistakes and regrets, and yes, the beauty of being an imperfect woman, the mother she didn't know.
I want her to know that a life of purpose and meaning comes from the journey, as difficult and mysterious as it may be. Plus, it never hurts to let your child know you did some pretty cool things.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I wanted a title that honored the career that demanded everything, but also connected me to my readers' own lived experiences. When News Breaks is not about a gonzo journalist. It's about what happens to any of us when news breaks and we, especially women, are called to meet the moment. When News Breaks is meant to take the reader into their own life-changing moments.
In my case, "breaking news" is the metaphor of my personal ambition and the emotional events that drove me toward a news career that asked everything in exchange for the thrill of the fast-paced accomplishment of telling other people's stories.
However, the book's arc is the personal journey away from the camera to become the mother my infant daughter needed me to be. Just as it was for all the survivors of tragic loss whom I interviewed during my journalism career, what defines us is how we rise and recover, whether it is from a betrayal, a fatal diagnosis, or any sudden loss.
During the revision process for When News Breaks, I noted that I tended to use time as a metaphor, how I stretched it or wasted it, what that countdown felt like before my show began, or that split second before the first plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, or the fractional moment and what I was doing when my husband called to tell me he has cancer.
I couldn't stop thinking about the "before," how I was happy or distracted or whatever I was thinking about before my life changed forever.
I am incredibly grateful that readers are finding themselves in my story and that the title and the cover design convey that there is beauty to be found, even when our lives break in ways we once couldn't imagine.
Q: How do you think journalism has changed since you worked at CNN and ABC?
A: Have you noticed how rarely we say "journalism" when we refer to the news? We often say "media" or "content." Somewhere along the way, we changed the way we think about the important distinction between information, info-tainment or what is news, what is not news.
Journalism is data-driven, fact-based, vetted reporting delivered by trained individuals who are held accountable by a news organization which abides by established best practices. I, the correspondent, am accountable to the facts.
When I was at CNN and ABC News, both networks had offices of Standards and Practices with a printed book defining what is qualified information to air. I was held accountable by a senior executive who oversaw fact checking.
It was not pleasant to receive a phone call from the Standards and Practices staff to answer questions as specific as why did I ask a more pointed question to one guest, but a less pointed question to the opposition, or how did I know the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is the same length as the border that separates Mexico from portions of the United States.
But I always knew whether in my reporting or anchoring, what I said mattered enough to get things right, and that I worked for a news organization that cared enough to hold me accountable.
Also today, I watch cable news as a viewer and wonder, what happened to the interviews with real people? What happened to the boots on the ground correspondent stories? All I see are panel discussions with so-called experts, the pundits.
While it's interesting to get their analysis, I believe empathy and compassion leads to curiosity about the common experience of being human. Let me hear from the town hall meeting, the victim's families, people impacted by the political events, not in a staged manner but organically as the news unfolds. I don't see that kind of reporting anymore. Everything is more “in-studio.”
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: Let me answer the second part first because the readers' experience with When News Breaks is the absolute most important aspect of publishing this book.
I am gobsmacked and grateful that readers see themselves in the pages. I receive emails and direct messages on social media about readers' mothers, marriages, struggles with work-life balance, and the questions they have about their own decisions when it comes to careers and children.
I have heard from former colleagues who say they read When News Breaks and experience their own reckoning about life choices.
Mine is a story where a complicated love of a job that demanded everything and a man who loved me whole, until I thought he didn't, is a more universal story than I ever realized. When a book lingers in the reader's mind and sparks conversations? It is all I could hope for.
As for the impact it had on me, it brought me closer to my daughter, who now knows my whole truth. It has brought me closer to my second husband, who cheered me on, even as I spent two years writing and revising a book about a very different love story.
The book has also reconnected me with CNN and ABC News colleagues whom I left behind in the wake of a lot of grief and healing. In some ways, When News Breaks is my thank you note to them for the years spent in the trenches, doing the hard work we all believed in at the time.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: 2026 is a big year for When News Breaks leading up to this year's 25th anniversary of 9/11. It is hard to believe so much time has passed. 9/11 was a big inflection point in When News Breaks, when that seminal event changed my life.
But while I'm promoting the book, I am also starting a novel based on a true story. I was involved as a Los Angeles County government senior advisor in the behind the scenes of a deputy-involved shooting that was so horrific on video, it went viral.
Inspired by Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, my book explores the power dynamics, politics and loss that occurs even as all parties claim to seek justice, the widow for her children, the sheriff's department devoted to saving lives that day, and the activists determined to take down policing as we know it.
We are conditioned to think that justice is the end goal, but what if our vested personal or political interests simply won't allow for it? Plus the characters, so far, are super fun to write.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Thank you for asking! To write a book is to be a dreamer. One estimate is that as many as 300,000 books are published every month. Yes, you read it correctly. I am humbled by this data and beyond grateful that When News Breaks is getting the attention it has gotten since its December 9, 2025 launch.
I write because doing so places me in an extraordinary community of other dreamers. We love the written word. We are not afraid of AI because we as human beings are intuitive, sentient creatures. Nothing will replace a beautiful story and I believe it takes a human being to write it.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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