Jane Pauley life and biography

Margaret Jane Pauley is an American television journalist, and has been involved in news reporting since 1975. She is most known for her 13-year tenure on NBC's Today program and later 12 years of Dateline NBC, and has acknowledged publicly her struggle with mental health and bipolar disorder.

After graduating from Indiana University in 1971, she worked as a reporter for an Indianapolis television station for a few years. In 1975, Pauley served briefly a reporter and a co-anchor in Chicago before leaving in 1976 to join NBC’s Today as a correspondent. She later became co-anchor with Tom Brokaw and his replacement Bryant Gumbel. In addition to her duties on Today, Pauley served as a correspondent and writer for NBC News for a time.

Resigning after a younger female host was added in 1989, Pauley began a successful NBC weekly magazine series, Real Life with Jane Pauley, later renamed Dateline. In 1995, her work was recognized with an Emmy and an American Women in Radio and Television Award. Pauley also substituted for Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News. In 2003, after 27 years of broadcasting, Pauley announced she was leaving NBC in June. A few months later, she signed a deal with the network to host her own daytime talk show, which premiered in the fall of 2004 and was canceled eight months later due to poor ratings.

In addition to her television career, Pauley has authored a book about her personal struggle with bipolar disorder, Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue (2004). Two years later, she became involved in a legal battle with The New York Times. In Pauley’s lawsuit, she claimed that she was misled about the nature of a 2005 interview she did. She believed that she was contributing to a news article within a special advertising supplement, not to the advertisement itself.

Pauley lives in New York City with her husband, cartoonist Garry Trudeau. They have three children, twins Rachel and Ross and Thomas.

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