Kaity Tong, the Emmy-winning PIX11 anchor who became synonymous with New York City television news over a career spanning six decades, announced her retirement Tuesday night, closing out one of the longest runs in local broadcast history.
Tong will anchor her final broadcast on August 30, ending a tenure at WPIX that stretches back more than 34 years. PIX11 Managing Editor Patrick Mason confirmed the departure, calling Tong "a powerhouse name in an industry that can change in a New York minute."
The announcement caps a remarkable arc for a woman who never planned to work in television at all. Born in China and raised in the United States after immigrating at age four, Tong was a doctoral candidate at Stanford University studying Chinese and Japanese studies before broadcasting pulled her away from academia for good.
Tong's path into journalism was accidental. During the 1970s, she took a summer job as morning editor and producer at KCBS All-News Radio in San Francisco. The seasonal gig turned into a year-long position, and her doctoral dissertation never got finished.
She moved to KPIX-TV in San Francisco, joining as a writer before becoming a reporter in 1976. A stint at KCRA in Sacramento followed. By 1981, she had relocated to New York to become a correspondent and weekend co-anchor at WABC, where she was named co-anchor of the 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. broadcasts roughly two years into her tenure.
In an era when departures from prominent roles often signal deeper institutional shifts, Tong's exit from WABC in 1991 was a lateral move with staying power. She joined WPIX that same year as the top female anchor on the weekday 10 p.m. news, and she never left.
She later moved to weekend coverage, anchoring the 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. broadcasts. Mason's tribute, reported by the New York Post, captured the scale of her presence in the market:
"After more than 34 years at WPIX, Kaity has opted to move into a much-deserved retirement at the end of August. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone in the New York City area who doesn't immediately associate PIX11 with Kaity."
Tong's list of honors reflects a career built on consistency rather than flash. She won several Emmy Awards, including for Outstanding Event Coverage for the 2003 special "9/11 America Remembers." New York Press Magazine named her Best Newscaster in Local Television News in 2008. She received the Ellis Island Medal of Honor in 1992 and the New York Women's Agenda Star Award in 1993.
In October 2025, the New York State Broadcasters Association inducted her into its Hall of Fame. During the ceremony, Tong acknowledged the unlikely turn her life had taken.
"I never aspired to be a broadcast journalist. No, I wanted to be a college professor."
Journalism ran in her family regardless. Both her mother and uncle were acclaimed journalists, though neither is identified by name in public accounts of her career.
Tong also fought a private health battle that became public in 2023, when she revealed a Stage 1 lung cancer diagnosis. She underwent surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York and declared herself "cancer-free" at the time of the disclosure. The announcement came in December of that year, and Tong continued working through it, a fact that underlines the discipline that kept her on air for decades while other prominent figures stepped away from demanding roles far sooner.
Tong's career spanned more than six decades, beginning with that summer radio job in San Francisco and ending with the August 30 sign-off at PIX11. She married and divorced twice. She shares a son, Phillip, with ex-husband Richard Long.
Her longevity at a single station stands out in a media landscape defined by constant turnover. Local television news has shed anchors, reporters, and entire formats at a pace that would have been unthinkable when Tong first sat behind a desk in New York. Stations have merged, rebranded, and slashed budgets. Tong stayed.
Mason's description, "journalist, anchor, icon, legend, friend, mentor", reads like the kind of praise reserved for retirement dinners. But the numbers back it up. More than 34 years at one station, in the most competitive local news market in the country, is not a participation trophy. It is a record built on showing up, night after night, when the industry around her kept changing.
High-profile departures have become routine across American institutions, from federal law enforcement leadership to state courts where sudden resignations leave the public scrambling for explanations. Tong's exit, by contrast, carries no scandal, no controversy, and no ambiguity, just a career that ran its full course.
In an age when trust in media institutions sits near historic lows, a local anchor who held one chair for a generation earned something most of her industry has lost: the benefit of the doubt from the people she covered.