ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, March 16, 1996 TAG: 9603190039
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
Jane Pauley is celebrating her 20th year with NBC News and making TV history doing it. Starting Sunday, she becomes the first woman ever to co-host four hours of prime time news programming a week when ``Dateline NBC'' finally takes on CBS' ``60 Minutes.''
With co-host Stone Phillips, Pauley now anchors Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday night editions of the prime-time news magazine. They've done so well that the network really believes it will put a dent in the CBS news magazine's ratings. ``60 Minutes'' has ruled Sunday nights since December 1975, two months after Pauley came to NBC.
Intimidating? Not for Pauley, who likes to remind everybody she's ``been there, done that'' already. In 1991, she hosted a short-lived Sunday night program called ``Real Life With Jane Pauley,'' which twice opposed ``60 Minutes'' when football games ran late.
``It was a character-building and humbling experience,'' she says. ``So the prospect of going opposite `60 Minutes' isn't new to me. But I certainly respect it.''
If they're smart, the folks at CBS ought to respect Pauley, too. She's enormously popular with viewers, who first fell for her 20 years ago when she replaced Barbara Walters on ``The Today Show.'' (Walters, who left to co-anchor the evening news at ABC, is celebrating her 20th anniversary there, too.)
Pauley is delighted that Walters has become a superstar, that ``so many of the heavies in the business are female'' and that they're ``of middle and advancing age. I think that's fabulous.''
Pauley is certainly one of those ``heavies'' in TV news. She's finally given NBC a hit news magazine, and at 45, she's the workhorse of NBC News, anchoring four prime-time hours, doing her own stories for most of those broadcasts and filling in for Tom Brokaw as anchor of ``NBC Nightly News.'' She even filled in for Katie Couric on ``The Today Show'' during Couric's maternity leave.
Dubbed ``Saint Jane'' in a 1994 TV Guide cover story, the warm and personable Pauley may be the most likable figure in the business. In the ruckus that surrounded her leaving ``The Today Show'' in 1989 to make room for Deborah Norville, millions of fans rallied around her - and deserted ``The Today Show,'' as the ratings showed.
That was a major wake-up call for NBC News, which is unlikely to underestimate Pauley's appeal again.
Arriving from NBC's WMAQ-TV in Chicago, where she was the station's first female evening co-anchor, Pauley made her network debut on Oct. 14, 1975. She was drop-dead beautiful, which used to count for a lot more than it does today. Tom Brokaw remembers her as ``looking like a prom queen'' but ``with the brains of the valedictorian.'' She still recalls her early years - her ``anchorette'' phase - when inexperience didn't count against her because so many male news directors felt they ``needed to get a girl on the news.'' She was the girl on the news.
That was the role of network newswomen then, too. Pauley says Barbara Walters' original ``Today'' contract restricted her to asking the third question during joint interviews with co-host Frank McGee, never the first or second. She credits the aggressive Walters with proving she could do anything a male reporter could do - and then some.
Pauley thinks things changed for her during her seventh year at NBC. She returned to ``The Today Show'' from 10 weeks' maternity leave and noticed people reacted to her differently. She finally was told everybody thought having a baby had done something to her persona, ``as if progesterone had changed me.''
Later, Pauley reached a different conclusion.
``What had changed, if anything,'' she said, ``was that a very showy pregnancy with twins probably caused people to take a second look and they suddenly noticed I was over 30. I was not an anchorette anymore.''
In those days, it also was assumed women news anchors would disappear after they reached a certain age. Big contracts for Pauley, Walters, Diane Sawyer and others now suggest that their networks want them to stay as long as they can still appear on camera.
Now Pauley says she loves hitting a milestone like 20 years. Why shouldn't she? She's still drop-dead beautiful, but has the hard-won respect of her peers in the news business, something looks can't buy. She concedes there was a time when TV newswomen ``might have buried the fact they had been in one place for 20 years. Twenty years does imply a certain level of maturity, shall we say.''
LENGTH: Medium: 86 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Jane Pauley will co-anchor Sunday's edition ofby CNB``Dateline NBC,'' premiering this week at 7 p.m. on WSLS-Channel
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