Jane Pauley Looks Back on a Life in News

When Jane Pauley takes the stage this evening at the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences 45th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards to receive her Lifetime Achievement statue, the pioneering broadcast journalist knows who she’ll be looking for in the audience.

“I’ll be thinking about my three children—even though one of them did ask to go to the Yankees game instead,” Pauley tells TVNewser with a hearty laugh. “Also, my husband of 44 years [cartoonist Garry Trudeau], he’ll be there, too.”

But there’s someone else that Pauley expects to see from the stage, a person only visible to her. That would be “Janie,” the 22-year-old woman from Indiana who broke into the TV news business in 1972 and became “Jane Pauley” to millions of viewers via her presence on Today, Dateline NBC and, currently, CBS News Sunday Morning.

“I’ll be thinking of Janie,” Pauley, now 73, admits. “She’s long gone now, but I dunno—maybe she’s not that far gone.”

Talking to Pauley, it’s apparent that “Janie” remains present inside her, glimpsed when she reflects with gratitude and no small amount of surprise on her longevity in the news game, a career that’s spanned multiple networks, timeslots, and formats. But “Jane” herself has also grown and changed over the years, particularly when it comes to recognizing and celebrating her achievements.

That kind of self-validation didn’t always come easily for Pauley, who memorably wrote in her 2004 autobiography Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue: “I am not one of the great journalists of my time.”

For the record, she still agrees with that assessment… but she’s going to accept her Lifetime Achievement Emmy anyway.

“I think my husband was a little concerned that I might try to talk them out of it,” Pauley jokes. “Frankly, at this stage of life, I do seem to have grown out of that somewhat. I can look back on the younger me and give her more credit than I would have given her before.”

This was a man’s world

One of the other themes that runs through Skywriting concerns Pauley’s experiences in the male-dominated media landscape of the ‘70s and ‘80s—an environment in which she was often marginalized and even infantilized by co-workers as well as reporters covering the industry. Looking back now, she characterizes that treatment as a “penalty of young fame,” referring both to her relatively quick rise to national prominence as well as her age.

“When I started on Today, I was so utterly self-conscious about my age that I led with it,” Pauley recalls. “I said, ‘I’m kind of ridiculously youthful and I don’t know how I got here—maybe you’re wondering that, too.’” She belatedly realized that might have been the wrong approach after a female guest—who she refers to as a “very savvy Washington figure”—advised her not to keep making her youth the story and give her male critics more ammunition.

“Looking back, I guess she thought I had a long career ahead of me,” Pauley says. “She must have thought that, because I did not!”

Even after she stopped directly leading with her age, the subject crept into her work on Today. During a 1987 interview with Madonna, for example, Pauley repeatedly asked the pop star about her childhood and being perceived as a kind of eternally youthful figure in the public eye. It’s another case where “Janie” seems to emerge from somewhere inside of “Jane,” which adds a fascinating dynamic to the interview, particularly in the unedited version that can be watched on YouTube.

Asked about that conversation over three decades later, Pauley isn’t shy about criticizing her younger self. “It has been brought to my attention that it is one of the worst interviews ever,” she says, chuckling. “I recall that Madonna was all business, and had an agenda that she didn’t want to budge from. It was a struggle. I should revisit it—maybe it’s not that bad.”

Pauley agrees that her interviewing style has evolved over the years. On CBS News Sunday Morning, for example, she eschews “bullseye” questions in favor of exploring the “outside rim” of a person’s life. “If they say something that is unexpected, I’m ready to hear it and follow it,” she explains.

Case in point: During a recent sit-down with Connie Chung, Pauley’s ears perked up when her friend and contemporary talked about her own, much different approach to navigating beneath and ultimately breaking through the glass ceiling that hovered over so many newsrooms forty years ago.  

“Connie said that her strategy was to just be one of the guys,” Pauley notes. “She and I have a great deal in common in that we were there at the beginning of something, along with women like Lesley Stahl, Judy Woodruff and Andrea Mitchell. Every year since then, you see a little bit more how the industry is evolving into something entirely new.”

There is no “last story”

Almost every journalist has that story they want to land before sailing away aboard the good ship Retirement. But Pauley’s career is unique in that she already filed her last story twenty years ago. After announcing her departure from Dateline, she received a call from Michael J. Fox requesting the honor of being her final interview. That conversation aired on May 13, 2003, as part of the special farewell episode, Jane Pauley: Signing Off.

Technically, that was the final interview for the “Jane Pauley” that arrived on the set of Today in 1975. Over the next two decades, Pauley pursued multiple career “reinventions” that included daytime talk show host, author and, ultimately, weekend anchor. (The one job she has yet to hold and still covets? Singer. “I still aspire to record an album,” Pauley reveals with a smile.)

And with no elusive “last story” left to pursue, she’s always open to the winds of change—an attitude that comes in handy when the news industry at large is seeing tremendous upheaval.

“I have some questions about where journalism is heading,” Pauley admits. “And I don’t know what the industry will look like [in the future]. But there is a very deep bench of talent out there, as anybody watching the Emmys will see. It’s an amazing world.”

And it’s a world that Jane—as well as “Janie”—remains a vital part of.