Tom Llamas Welcomes Nightly Viewers as ABC and CBS Stumble

Evening news rarely makes headlines, but NBC just turned a pretty old-school format into a live experiment. Tom Llamas has been in the 'NBC Nightly News' chair since June, stepping in for longtime anchor Lester Holt, and the show is clearly trying to court younger viewers while ABC and CBS deal with their own headaches.

What NBC changed — and why it matters

Llamas, 46, replacing Holt, 66, isn’t just a personnel swap. It’s NBC repositioning its flagship broadcast for an audience that isn’t exactly racing to network TV at 6:30 p.m. The strategy: speed up the show, treat social media as the competition, and make the broadcast a gateway to NBC’s streaming news pipeline.

At the end of recent shows, Llamas has been giving a little wave to the folks just tuning in for the first time — which is both savvy and, frankly, a little unusual for a nightly newscast. As Variety flagged, he has been closing with this:

"And before we go tonight, a number of new viewers have found us in the past couple weeks, and we want to thank them for joining us. Tonight, and always, we’re here for you."

The moving parts (and why the timing helps)

• ABC’s 'World News Tonight' with David Muir is still the big dog overall, but it recently vanished from YouTube TV during a carriage dispute — not helpful when a chunk of the audience now watches through streaming bundles.
• Over at CBS, 'Evening News' is testing a dual-anchor setup, a shake-up that, fair or not, can make a broadcast feel in flux while viewers decide if they like the new chemistry.
• NBC has Llamas running a two-a-day: after the network newscast, he jumps to the streaming show 'Top Story' to keep the pipeline going for people who don’t do appointment TV.
• Llamas has literally picked up the pace of the broadcast, framing it as competing with the phone — which, honestly, it is.
• The ratings picture: NBC isn’t topping Muir overall, but 'Nightly' has logged multiple wins in the key 25–54 demo. That matters when ad money is tight — and it is. Ad dollars for evening news are down about 6% from 2020 to 2024.

The bigger audience puzzle

This push lines up with where the audience lives now. A Pew Research snapshot from September 2025 says over 40% of adults 18–29 get their news on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. So NBC isn’t just swapping anchors; it’s trying to make the nightly broadcast feel like it’s in conversation with the feeds, not falling behind them.

The Llamas of it all

If Llamas looks comfortable in the spotlight, there’s a reason. He used to be at ABC and was once seen internally as David Muir’s heir apparent. Now NBC is the one betting on him to pull in younger viewers while keeping the legacy audience. For the trivia heads: he’s married to Jennifer Llamas, an executive producer at MSNBC.

Bottom line: NBC is leaning into a faster, more cross-platform 'Nightly News' with a rising anchor who talks directly to the new people walking in the door. And right now, with ABC dealing with distribution flare-ups and CBS tinkering with format, that bet is getting a decent test run.