Larry King to end show in the fall

Larry King has conducted tens of thousands of interviews over the years

In the face of falling ratings, the CNN host Larry King announced Tuesday evening that he would end his long-running talk show, “Larry King Live,” this fall.

Jonathan Klein, president of CNN's domestic channel, said that Mr. King, 76, was ending the show “on his own terms,” just after his 25th anniversary. Mr. Klein said he would announce a new 9 p.m. program over the summer.

Mr. King will stay at CNN part time; in an announcement on his show, he said that he would host an undetermined number of specials “on major national and international subjects.”

“Larry King Live,” the centerpiece of the CNN prime-time schedule, has seen its ratings drop sharply in recent years, particularly in the last six months, leading to widespread talk that Mr. King's current contract, which will expire in June 2011, could be his last. Asked by Bill Maher, his guest on his Tuesday night show, about the speculation in the media, Mr. King said “that had nothing to do with it.” He said he approached CNN management about the change and they “graciously accepted.”

It will give “more time for my wife and I to get to the kids' little league games,” he said on his show. Mr. King and his seventh wife, Shawn Southwick, reunited in May after having filed for divorce a month earlier.

In the last few weeks, executives at CNN, a unit of Time Warner, have repeatedly had to deny that they were close to signing a deal for Mr. King's replacement. Piers Morgan, a judge on “America's Got Talent,” has been rumored to be talking to CNN about a job. Others likely to be seen as candidates are Katie Couric and Ryan Seacrest.

On Tuesday night, he said he would recommend Mr. Seacrest, “if he has a great interest in politics.”

Humbly, he added, “I'm sure there's a ton of people that could do it. Come on, it's Q.&A.”

The timing of Mr. King's announcement came as a shock to many at CNN, where “Larry King Live” has been the only consistent part of an ever-evolving lineup.

Presidents and CNN chiefs have come and gone since the talk show started at 1985. Mr. King noted that his show was recently recognized by the Guinness World Records as being the longest-running show with the same host in the same time slot.

“With this chapter closing, I'm looking forward to the future and what my next chapter will bring, but for now it's time to hang up my nightly suspenders,” he concluded in a blog post that he read on the air.

Mr. Klein told his employees that CNN would “celebrate tenure in proper fashion over the coming months.”

Attention will quickly turn to hiring a new host for one of the most coveted and potentially one of the most lucrative time slots in cable. Asked what viewers should expect from CNN in prime time, Mr. Klein said in an interview, “informed opinion, insightful analysis, real reporting. That's what we do.”

“We're positioning ourselves to be even better at it in the years ahead,” he said.

CNN has shown a willingness to try new formats this year. In the 7 p.m. time slot, it replaced Lou Dobbs with a political news show. In the 8 p.m. time slot, it is preparing to replace the news show “Campbell Brown” with an as-yet-untitled discussion show with Eliot Spitzer, the disgraced former New York governor, and Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist at The Washington Post.

On Mr. King's show Tuesday, TV stars like Regis Philbin and Diane Sawyer called in to praise the host, whom Mr. Maher called the “Mickey Mantle of broadcasters.” Though sometimes criticized for going easy on guests, Mr. King was admirably versatile, able to interview a singer and a president in the same week (he did so this month, with Lady Gaga on a Tuesday and President Obama on a Thursday).

In recent years “Larry King Live” has lost a substantial amount of its audience, mirroring CNN as a whole, which has struggled to figure out how to compete in a sharply partisan cable news environment. Andrew Tyndall, a TV news analyst, said CNN depended for too long on Mr. King and his once-formidable audience. “They decided to cash in on his high ratings and postpone refreshing the whole lineup,” he said.

Now the ratings are a source of embarrassment for the channel. In the second quarter of this year, Mr. King's show averaged 674,000 viewers, its lowest viewership in at least a decade, according to ratings from the Nielsen Company. It ranks well behind most popular cable news show at 9 p.m., “Hannity” on Fox News, as well as the No. 2 “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC.

Those shows are nothing like Mr. King's. On a special 25th anniversary show this month, he reminisced about a career's worth of interviews — every sitting president, Frank Sinatra, Tammy Faye Bakker, Marlon Brando, Ross Perot — and he said he had found that most of his guests were willing to open up to him. “If you work at it long enough and hard enough,” he said, “you can draw people out.”

Bill Carter contributed reporting.