Journalist Virginia makes shock announcement regarding future at ABC Radio

The ABC veteran will hang up the headphones next month after four years in the role.

Virginia Trioli to hang up the headset on ABC radio.

Radio host Virginia Trioli has announced she will be stepping down from her ABC News Melbourne Mornings role from mid-September.

The two-time Walkley Award winner informed her listeners on Thursday she had made the heartbreaking decision to hang up the headphones due to ongoing health issues in her family.

“After a difficult period of dealing with multiple illnesses in my family and also with the realisation that I think you’re lucky if you get even one warning about how long you have on this earth with the people that you love, I now find myself at that stage of life, that requires me to live and to work in a different way,” she said.

Trioli returned to the chair in April after a four month break caused by a “long and complex summer of family illness”.

Virginia Trioli will be moving into a new role with the ABC. Picture: ABC

Trioli decided she would be leaving the show after returning for a period of leave. She explained that upon her return, she spoke to her managers to inform them of the “very bloody hard” choice to leave.

“After almost 20 years of working to the hardest alarms that the ABC has to offer, presenting mornings on ABC Radio Sydney for several years, 11 years as the founding anchor of news breakfast and on Melbourne mornings here, it’s a change that feels unavoidable for me right now,” she continued telling her listeners.

“It’s something I think that many of us here in Melbourne and Victoria well understand after the last few years.”

Trioli’s last day on the show will be September 15 – exactly four years after she took on the position from Jon Faine.

Her replacement will be revealed on Friday’s show, with Trioli promising her listeners they will “love” the person stepping in.

Despite Trioli stepping down from the radio show, she will not be leaving the national broadcaster, with the ABC offering her a role in television, where she will present a new prime time Arts show, commencing next year.

“ABC Radio Melbourne and its audience is a family, like no other and I’m so lucky to have been a part of it. So until then, on with the show and thank you,” she said.

Her departure comes two months after it was reported the slot’s ratings continued to slide, dropping to 7.7 per cent audience share, meaning she lost almost half of her listeners in the past year-and-a-half.

In the last gfk ratings survey released this week, ABC Mornings was 7.5, lengths behind main rival 3AW’s Neil Mitchell on 20.1.