Veteran journalist Judy Woodruff, PBS NewsHour senior correspondent and former anchor and managing editor, will share insights from five decades of news reporting in "An Evening with Judy Woodruff" on Friday, August 28, at 7:30 p.m., at the Camden Opera House, sponsored by the Camden Conference.

 

"An icon of in-depth reporting and journalistic integrity," said Camden Conference, in a news release, Woodruff will be interviewed onstage by Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, executive director of the nonprofit Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, which publishes The Maine Monitor.

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"A retired Senior Foreign Service officer who spent 26 years advancing press freedom and democratic governance across the Middle East and Southeast Europe, Schweitzer-Bluhm brings a distinctive perspective to a conversation about journalism's role in democracy."

 

According to Camden Conference, Woodruff has been a trailblazer for women journalists since she started her career, at age 23, at a CBS affiliate in Atlanta, covering the Georgia State House at a time when broadcast news was dominated by male anchors and reporters. In the 1976 presidential campaign, NBC News assigned Woodruff to cover Jimmy Carter, whose surprise victory led to her assignment as a White House correspondent.

 

In 1983, Woodruff became the chief Washington correspondent for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, where she reported on politics and served as backup anchor and host of the weekly documentary series Frontline with Judy Woodruff. In 1993 she moved to CNN, where she co-anchored CNN's WorldView and moderated several presidential primary debates in 2000 and 2004. After leaving CNN in 2005 she was a visiting fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University and taught a course on media and politics at her alma mater, Duke University. Woodruff rejoined PBS in 2006 as special correspondent on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and became sole anchor of The PBS NewsHour in 2016, a role she held until 2022. In 2017, The New York Times noted of her work: "Ms. Woodruff's measured delivery, with her hands clasped and her voice low, stands as a counterweight to a haywire era of American news."

 

Woodruff's numerous awards include an Emmy for Lifetime Achievement, the Peabody Journalistic Integrity Award, the Poynter Medal, and the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism. She is the author of This is Judy Woodruff at the White House (Addison-Wesley, 1982).

 

For tickets to "An Evening with Judy Woodruff" or for more information, visit camdenconference.org.