At least five veteran reporters at KNBC-TV Channel 4 will leave the station at the end of the year after accepting early retirement packages, according to news reports.

Chuck Henry, who first appeared on Southern California newscasts more than 50 years ago, as well as Beverly White, Vikki Vargas, Angie Crouch and Kim Baldonado are all said to be departing the station after this month, according to the Los Angeles Times and other news outlets.

KNBC officials did not respond to requests to comment on the departures and most of the reporters leaving have not made public statements either.

Vikki Vargas and the NBC News Team accept the Emmy for live coverage of a mass shooting in Seal Beach in August 2012. Vargas and four other longtime KNBC reporters have taken early retirement buyouts and will leave by the end of the year. (Photo by Phil McCarten/Invision for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences/AP Images)

But in an emotional video posted on social media, Vargas, who worked at the station for 41 years, confirmed that the news about her retirement is true.

“There’s a saying that all good things must come to an end,” Vargas said standing before a camera with the ocean in the background. “And so I’ve decided to announce my retirement this way, the best way I know how.

“I look back on 40, 41 years and realize I have ridden the best wave of television news ever,” she continued. “When I started we used those big brick cell phones and we shot on three-quarter inch tape. And today we edit on computers and we shoot on a card … smaller than a postage stamp.”

She noted how the diversity of the newsroom has changed in that time, and the stories its reporters have told, too.

“There’s been so much evolution on that front, and I’ve got to see it all,” Vargas continued, tears filling her eyes at times. “But mostly the biggest benefit to me has been the number of you who allowed me to come into your homes, into your hearts and your lives.

“When I knock on that door and the person on the other side says yes, it’s phenomenal to me,” she said. “It’s the biggest perk of this job to meet someone who has just lost their child, their business, their home, whatever the circumstance might have been, and that you allow me to tell that story. Knowing it will become very, very public in the moments afterwards.

“But beyond that, I’ve remained friends with a lot of you, a lot of you, and so because of that we’ve been able to talk about the human resilience,” Vargas said. “How over the years you’ve come away from, gotten better than, reinvented yourself, whatever it’s been from that moment of tragedy when I first met you.

“That’s the biggest perk.”

Vargas was the first Latina reporter at KNBC when the station hired her in 1982. Born in Downey, she grew up in La Habra, graduated from Cal State Fullerton, and for many years anchored the station’s Orange County bureau.

Henry joined KNBC in 1994 as an anchor and reporter, though he already was familiar to Southern California viewers from his 19 years at KABC-TV Channel 7 where he worked from 1971 to 1978, and again from 1982 to 1993.

White arrived at KNBC in 1992 and for many of the 30 years that followed worked the late shift, reporting on breaking news around Southern California. Four years ago, she received the National Association of Black Journalists Chuck Stone Lifetime Achievement Award.

Baldonado grew up in San Gabriel and landed at the station in 1995. Crouch, after graduating college in Michigan in 1988, made her way to KNBC in 2004.

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