Jane Pauley got the message about the power of news early on in life. Born Margaret Jane Pauley in 1950, the youngest of two daughters, she grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, where her mother was a church organist and her father worked in food distribution.
At home, newspapers were a constant. “When major events happened in the world, my parents somehow got a notice in the mail that they were personally going to be affected,” she said in a sit-down with “The Interviews” series. Pauley said her father saved all the newspapers and climbed into bed to read them, with the papers layered over the bedspread.
“There was always news in the house,” Pauley said.
The newspapers, the radio and broadcast news — all of them carried an implicit message: The news mattered. Even now, Pauley said she looks forward to the newspaper every morning. She calls it her personal ritual.
Decades later, Pauley would become a multi-hyphenate — a legendary, award-winning journalist whose career spans more than 50 years. She is a mother, an author and a longtime advocate for mental health awareness and treatment.
And this weekend, she will be the recipient of the 2025 Poynter Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism. The institute will also honor G.B. “Garry” Trudeau and Dean Baquet with the Distinguished Service to Journalism Award at its annual Bowtie Ball in Tampa, Florida.
“I think Jane was one of the early pioneers in television news,” Neal Shapiro, president and CEO of WNET, said in a tribute film produced by the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame (which inducted her in 2016). “We take it for granted today. We see women in so many roles but, when Jane was breaking in, she was one of the first.”
In a 1989 appearance on his show, fellow Indianapolis native David Letterman introduced Pauley as “one of the warmest and most popular figures in the history of American television.”
Jane Pauley, then host of the “Today” show, plays to the audience while speaking with David Letterman during the taping of Thursday’s “Late Night with David Letterman” show at NBC studios In New York December 28, 1989. (AP Photo/Susan Ragan)
Pauley began her broadcasting career fresh out of college at WISH-TV in Indianapolis. Former news director Lee Giles recalled that Pauley didn’t have a background in news at all and there were no openings at the time. When one came up, he called her back and asked her to write a newscast. “That’ll be make it or break it,” Giles recalled.
Pauley delivered it on camera, without a teleprompter. “I knew it had gone well,” she said in another interview. “If there was one thing I could do, it was organize thoughts. I was a good writer. And I could talk news.”
Pauley later moved to Chicago, where she became the first woman to anchor an evening newscast. Then she landed in New York City, where she succeeded Barbara Walters on NBC’s “Today” show at 25 years old — a move that marked her rise to national prominence. She later co-anchored “Dateline NBC” for more than a decade and, for a year, the daytime series, “The Jane Pauley Show.” For nearly a decade, she has hosted “CBS Sunday Morning.”
In 2001, the Emmy-winning broadcast journalist was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 50. Since then, she has become a powerful advocate for mental health awareness. In a 2019 interview on “CBS Mornings,” she spoke about her diagnosis and her goal of encouraging more open, sophisticated conversations about mental health. In 2009, she became the namesake of the Jane Pauley Community Health Center in Indiana, which has since expanded to multiple locations across the state.
Throughout her life and career, Pauley has been closely associated with reinvention. She has been fearless in forging new opportunities for herself. “My husband (Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau) used to joke and call it the revolving door. There goes Jane, she’s out and, oops, she’s back again. That’s truly the story of my life,” Pauley said in a 2020 AARP column. “In 1989, I marched out the door at the ‘Today’ show and came back in as host of NBC’s ‘Dateline.’”
She loves being asked what she plans to do next. “I may be reinventing myself over and over again, working with where I am and what I got, and what my opportunities are.”
