Jane Pauley is best known as longtime morning broadcaster for NBC’s Today, an NBC news reporter, and, most recently, as a cohost for NBC’s popular news-magazine, Dateline. Her career began at the age of 21, when she was hired as daytime and weekend caster at WISH-TV in Indianapolis. Four years later she was appointed as the first woman to anchor the evening news at WMAQ, Chicago. Despite low ratings, Pauley was selected in 1976 to interview as a possible successor to Barbara Walters as Tom Brokaw’s cohost on NBC’s Today. Competing with well-known reporters Linda Ellerbee and Betty Rolin, Pauley was chosen for the position, shocking the industry and disappointing critics who found her too cheery, young, and pretty. Though fans embraced Pauley for these qualities, NBC News president Dick Wald defended Pauley’s hire based on her poise and control. Her honest address and family commitment, radically different from the more reserved Diane Sawyer, made Pauley popular with female baby boomers. Pauley spent the next 13 years cohosting Today. Her team ushered the program past ABC’s Good Morning America, to become the number one morning show in the United States.

When NBC hired Bryant Gumbel, a sportscaster with no news experience, to succeed Tom Brokaw as head anchor, a compliant Pauley remained in the coanchor seat. Her career seemed to flounder further when renowned Washington reporters Chris Wallace and Judy Woodruff joined the morning group, pushing Pauley to the periphery. Finally, in 1989, NBC brought 31-year-old Debra Norville to the Today team, to attract a youthful audience. Sensing she would soon be replaced, Pauley threatened to break her $1.2 million Today contract two years early, to which NBC responded with the offer of Pauley’s own prime-time magazine show. Despite the fact that she had prevailed in a long, hard-nosed battle and achieved a notable appointment, the media cast Pauley as a spurned wife, to the mistress Norville. Nevertheless, Pauley departed gracefully with a sincere, on-air good-bye to Norville, leaving the show’s ratings to tumble 22 percent during sweeps week, and ultimately losing its number one spot to Good Morning, America.

Following this media soap opera, Pauley herself became the news item of the day, appearing on talk shows, featured in magazines and on Life magazine’s cover, in December 1989, which proclaimed, “How Jane Pauley Got What She Wanted: Time for Her Kids, Prime Time for Herself.” Pauley became deputy anchor to Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News, and in 1989, her magazine pilot, Changes, received the highest ratings in its prime-time slot. Her subsequent 1991 show, Real Life with Jane Pauley, featuring human interest reports for her traditional audience, aired five successful summer segments. In pursuit of a broader audience, the magazine was revamped in 1992 as Dateline NBC, adding investigative reporting, and reporter Stone Philips aboard as cohost. Dateline suffered a huge press attack on its ethics when it was discovered that producers staged the explosion of a General Motors truck for an auto safety report; viewers, however, stayed tuned, and by 1995 Dateline was a consistent ratings winner.

By calling NBC’s bluff, Pauley was catapulted to the ranks of other women investigative TV reporters such as Maria Shriver, Connie Chung, and Diane Sawyer. Nevertheless, Jane Pauley continues to be framed by the mass media and NBC as the maternal, baby-boom, career heroine of television news fame.

Pauley is a trustee of the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation and a fellow with the Society for Professional Journalists (SPJ).