ST. LOUIS – FOX 2’s morning traffic anchor Molly Rose said goodbye for the last time Thursday morning.
She started with FOX 2 in 2017 as a reporter covering everything from breaking news to city council meetings. She and her husband welcomed daughter Hattie in July 2020, and now they are preparing for a baby boy due in December.
Her co-anchors sent her off on air Thursday morning.
Molly said she wakes up at 3 a.m. to make it to work, and she said with two kiddos, she just needs some more sleep.
“Just really looking to get some more sleep, I’ll be doing some more work from home, working normal hours, that sort of thing. Leaving the crazy awesome business of TV news,” Molly said.
She also asked her coworkers and FOX 2 viewers to stay in touch on social media.
“I’m going to miss you guys so much and all of our viewers who are just so awesome and so nice,” Molly said.
She’s from the St. Louis area and is planning on staying here. She said she will be home on the couch watching FOX 2 with the rest of the viewers.
Molly shared this message with her Facebook fans Thursday morning:
After 12 years, today is my last day working in news. It’s a decision I didn’t think I would ever make but it’s time to make some changes to prioritize my health and sleep — waking up at 3 AM just isn’t realistic for me anymore. I go to work in the middle of the night and I’m a stay-at-home mom during the day, and I can’t continue to juggle both while running on zero.
I think one of the hardest parts about walking away is giving up something that I’ve let become a lot of my identity. I’ll miss my FOX 2 family dearly — everybody here is a class act and I feel lucky to have spent nearly five years working alongside them. Working in news is full of high, highs, and low, lows. The news industry is a grind, and when I reflect on the past decade I think of the “highs” — meeting incredible people on a daily basis who trusted me to tell their stories, going to NYC to accept a National Edward R Murrow Award for an investigative piece, and a front-row seat to everything happening in the cities I worked in… but it’s important to remember the “lows” too — because after all, as a journalist I am about the facts and being transparent.
Being a journalist isn’t a job of glamour that it might appear as in your Instagram feed. This past decade has been full of sacrifices… moving across the country for my first job, missing every Christmas and Thanksgiving with my family for years, working every weekend for five years, taking on the grief of others on a daily basis — especially during my years in KC where I covered mostly crime, and then taking that grief home with me, knocking on doors I didn’t want to knock on, and the list goes on. These experiences have made me grateful for my life.
I’m excited about change though… like staying up past 7 PM so I can watch a Netflix show with my husband. So what’s next? I’ll be entering the world of public relations aka going to “the dark side” as we journalists call it. Time for more WFH opportunities, more sleep and a new challenge.
Continue to support your local journalists — I know I’ll still be tuning in, just from at home on the couch! Here’s to the end of a challenging, rewarding *and* amazing journey in the news biz!