KCRA morning fixture Erin Heft departing Sacramento for new role in Dallas
Northern California will say goodbye this week to a familiar face on KCRA’s morning newscast as Erin Heft leaves Sacramento’s NBC affiliate for a job closer to her Texas roots.
Erin Heft first joined Channel 3 as a news intern in June 2018. After a nearly three-year stint with the E.W. Scripps Co. as a reporter and fill-in anchor, she returned to the station in June 2021 as a reporter and fill-in anchor. Now, the self-proclaimed Northern California lover will head to Dallas to join what she described as a “legendary newsroom,” Heft announced in a Facebook post Tuesday.
“I’m filled with thrill and grief,” Heft said in a Thursday interview. “Thrilled because I can’t wait to go, but grief because it’s the closure of the chapter of Northern California, and I really do just adore it here.”
Heft arrived in Northern California in 2014 to put herself through college, working for the San Diego Padres as an on-field correspondent before eventually becoming a staff writer for SB Nation’s Padres site, Gaslamp Ball. She also worked as a reporter for Golding Publications and later for SBM Management Services while pursuing her degree.
As she completed her bachelor’s degree at the Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University online, Heft joined KCRA as an intern in 2018.
“When I got the internship, it was such a privilege,” Heft said. “It was actually the first newsroom — professional working newsroom — that I ever spent any time in, and I was just in awe of the talent that was within the room.”
A native of Texas, Heft moved to Waco less than a week after finishing her internship at KCRA, and though she enjoyed her time there, her “goal was to make it immediately back to KCRA.”
Since returning to Sacramento in 2021, Heft has been a fixture on the station’s morning team, working alongside journalists who had once been her mentors during her internship. Heft described Northern California as a “wonderland of a news market, because there’s a little bit of everything always happening.”
Reflecting on her time at Channel 3, she pointed to coverage of the 2021 wildfire season and reporting on the K Street mass shooting as among the most meaningful work of her career.
Although she declined to identify her next employer before its official announcement, Heft said the move to the Dallas-Fort Worth market will bring her within about a two-hour drive of family while offering new opportunities for growth. Dallas-Fort Worth is the nation’s fourth-largest television market.
“It has been a privilege of a lifetime, and I will never be the same, and I am just full of gratitude,” Heft said.
