Jane Pauley

Margaret Jane Pauley (born October 31, 1950) is an American television host and author, active in news reporting since 1972.

Margaret Jane Pauley was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on October 31, 1950.

She is a fifth-generation Hoosier and the second child of Richard Grandison Pauley and Mary E. (née Patterson) Pauley.

Her father was a traveling salesman, and her mother was a homemaker.

According to her memoir, Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue, Pauley described herself as such a shy little kid she allowed her second-grade teacher to call her Margaret Pauley all year rather than tell her she preferred her middle name, Jane.

Pauley grew up idolizing her older sister, Ann, who has been her closest confidante since childhood.

A speech and debate champion at Warren Central High School in Indianapolis, Pauley placed first in the Girls' Extemporaneous Speaking division of the National Forensic League in Indiana.

After graduating from high school in 1968, Pauley attended Indiana University, majoring in political science.

She was a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma where she sang with the sorority jug band, the Kappa Pickers.

She graduated from Indiana University Bloomington with a B.A. in Political Science in 1972.

After three years at WISH-TV, in 1975, Pauley joined veteran anchor Floyd Kalber at NBC affiliate WMAQ-TV to become Chicago's first woman co-anchor on a major evening newscast, marking the beginning of her career with NBC.

Barely ten months later, Pauley was chosen to replace Barbara Walters on the Today show.

Pauley first became widely known as Barbara Walters's successor on the NBC morning show Today, beginning at the age of 25, where she was a co-anchor from 1976 to 1989, at first with Tom Brokaw, and later with Bryant Gumbel; for a short while in the late 1980s she and Gumbel worked with Deborah Norville.

She also anchored the Sunday edition of NBC Nightly News from 1980 to 1982; and often substituted for the weekend editions 1996-1999.

Following in the footsteps of the first female co-anchor of the show, Barbara Walters, she became a symbol for professional women, and more specifically, female journalists.

In 1983, after giving birth to twins following a very public pregnancy, Pauley became a role model to working mothers.

In her autobiography, And So It Goes, Pauley's colleague Linda Ellerbee wrote, "She [Pauley] is what I want to be when I grow up."

In 1989, with her job apparently threatened by Norville's addition to the program, she asked to be released from her contract, but her request was denied.

Pauley co-hosted the Today show from 1976 to December 29, 1989; first with Tom Brokaw from 1976 to December 1981 and then with Bryant Gumbel beginning January 4, 1982.

The Detroit Free Press wrote on September 27, 1989, that Jane Pauley in some ways represents the best of women in television, that she never took it too seriously, that she knew the difference between television and real life, and that her family counted more than her ratings.

1989 brought big changes to Today when news reader Deborah Norville was given a larger role in the two hour broadcast.

Speculation in the media implied that NBC executives were easing Pauley out to advance the younger NBC newscaster.

As Tom Shales of The Washington Post wrote at the time, watching Ms. Pauley, Ms. Norville, and co-anchor Bryant Gumbel on the set together "is like looking at a broken marriage with the home-wrecker right there on the premises."

Pauley, who had been contemplating a change, hoping to spend more time with her three children, asked to settle her contract, but NBC declined.

In October 1989, after prolonged negotiations, Pauley announced that, after 13 years, she would leave the Today show in December, but would soon begin working on other projects at NBC.

Public reaction amid the perception that Pauley was being cast aside for a younger woman was swift and consequential.

Pauley's image was run on the cover of many magazines those months, including the December 1989 cover of Life magazine with the headline "Our Loss, Her Dream: How Jane Pauley got what she wanted – time for her kids, prime time for herself".

As The New York Times reported on February 26, 1990, in the three weeks since January 26, the Today show lost 10 percent of its audience.

Since Jane Pauley left as co-host and Deborah Norville replaced her, the Today show had fallen from its leadership position in the competition among the three network morning shows to a distant second place, almost a full rating point behind ABC's Good Morning America.

A July 23, 1990 New York Magazine article entitled "Back From the Brink, Jane Pauley Has Become America's Favorite Newswoman" reported that from February 1989 to February 1990, Today experienced a ratings slump of 22% and the cost to the network and its affiliates was estimated by one insider at close to $10 million for the year.

After Pauley announced she was leaving Today, she received more than 4000 letters of support, including one from Michael Kinsley, then of The New Republic, which anointed her "heroine of my generation. The first Baby Boomer they tried to put out to pasture … and failed."

New York Magazine dubbed her "The Loved One" on its July 23, 1990 cover.

Pauley returned to the air in a March 13, 1990 NBC in a primetime special appropriately titled "Changes: Conversations with Jane Pauley."

Her next regular anchor position was at the network's newsmagazine Dateline NBC from 1992 to 2003, where she teamed with Stone Phillips.

In 2003, Pauley left NBC News and in 2004–05 hosted The Jane Pauley Show, a syndicated daytime talk show which was canceled after one season.

In 2009, she began to appear on The Today Show as a contributor hosting a weekly segment sponsored by AARP called “Your Life Calling.”

In 2014, Pauley appeared as an interview subject on the CBS program CBS Sunday Morning; positive audience response to this segment led to Pauley being hired as a contributor to the show later in 2014.

She was elevated to the role of the program's host in 2016, succeeding Charles Osgood, once again making her the anchor of a regular morning news program for the first time in over 25 years and becoming her first job as the host of any television program since 2005; she continues in this role as of 2024.

She has publicly acknowledged her struggle with bipolar disorder.

She is married to the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip Doonesbury.