March is Women’s History Month and in honor of the occasion, TODAY.com sat down with TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie, Jenna Bush Hager, Dylan Dreyer and Laura Jarrett to learn more about the career track that led them to where they are now.
As many women in media will attest, the ascent to the anchor or host seat isn’t an easy one, but thanks to trailblazers like Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Jessica Savitch, Connie Chung, Oprah Winfrey and many others, it’s now commonplace to find women behind the desk and in front of the camera. Something that was a rarity as recent as the 1970s.
In fact, it wasn’t until 2006, that a woman made history after becoming the first female anchor of a major network evening news program. Her name? Katie Couric, TODAY’s longtime anchor and journalism trailblazer in her own right.
For anyone pursuing a career in broadcast news, it’s often a road paved with rejection and dogged perseverance. But for those who land their dream job, there’s often one pivotal opportunity that led them there.
As present-day luminaries in the industry, Savannah, Jenna, Dylan and Laura reflect on the journey that brought them to TODAY and the decisive moment that changed the course of their careers and, ultimately, their lives.
Savannah Guthrie: ‘I took big leaps and did things that were risky’
A nearly 14-year veteran of TODAY, Savannah’s resume reads like the dream bucket list for any aspiring journalist. Among her many accolades, Savannah has covered Olympic games including Paris, Tokyo and London, interviewed countless celebrities and luminaries, as well as the last four sitting U.S. presidents, and covered nearly every major news event of the past decade.
It’s a storied career that Savannah says might have never happened, if not for a pivotal decision that led her to table her burgeoning career in TV news to attend law school instead. There was a “yes” moment she says changed her entire life, and probably not for the reason you might think.
“That was the first, in several moments in my career, where I took big leaps and did things that were risky and unexpected, and I think those jumps are what got me here,” the anchor tells TODAY.com in a sit-down interview.
In fact, far from the being the “safe” choice, deciding to become a lawyer meant walking away from just about everything she knew and had accomplished up until that point.
“I’m going to leave my television career that I’ve worked on behind and go in this completely new direction, moving across the country where I don’t know a soul. I don’t have a dime, I’m going to move in with three other girls in a group house; I’ve never met any of them. I’m going to go for this. I’m not sure if it’s exactly what I want, but it feels like the next right step,” she says of the leap of faith.
Even so, it was a risk she was willing to take, a door that Savannah says, she needed to walk through in order to find out what was on the other side.
“It’s making a decision that, in the moment, is incredibly risk-taking and blows up everything that is comfortable about your life and everywhere that you think that you’re going. And doing it not because you’re sure, doing it even when you’re not sure how it will turn out or whether it will turn out.”
After earning her law degree (not to mention the highest score on the Arizona Bar Exam in 2002), Savannah became a practicing lawyer and had even lined up a clerkship with a federal judge before realizing that her heart remained in television.
For a second time in her career, she walked away from the safe choice in pursuit of the unknown. A leap she says was easier to make given that she’d already done it once before and discovered that taking risks was the key to her success.
“For me, key moments of taking big chances and essentially betting on myself paid off in a big way and you have to practice that,” she explains. “It never feels great in the moment, but if you’ve done it once and it turned out okay, it gives you the confidence to do it again and again and again.”
In no small part, it’s that confidence that got her to where she is now.
“I really believe we will be called on over and over again in our lives to take a risk, a leap, whether it’s our personal lives, risking vulnerability in a relationship, or whether it’s a career move that has you pursuing a lifelong dream, not knowing if anything in that path is assured.”
Laura Jarrett: ‘I knocked on every possible door’
Laura Jarrett, senior legal correspondent for NBC News and co-anchor of Saturday TODAY, was practicing corporate law as a “low-level associate making binders” in the mid-2000s, and was “miserable” doing it.
“I was bored and I was searching for purpose. I knew I wanted to use my law degree, but I didn’t know how to make it work,” Laura tells TODAY.com.
It was her husband, Tony Balkissoon, who suggested that she give her dream of being a TV news analyst a shot. Then, TODAY’s Savannah Guthrie helped sealed the deal.
“Savannah Guthrie says to me, ‘Look, you could always fall back on (law),’ because she was a lawyer and she knew the path and she knew how miserable I was,” she explains.
It was all the encouragement she needed: Laura left law in pursuit of a television career, but says that it didn’t come easy. “I knocked on every possible door and I got told ‘no’ a lot because I had no experience,” she says.
It was CNN that ultimately gave the aspiring legal analyst a 4 a.m. slot, delivering the “yes” moment that launched her career.
“If CNN hadn’t said, ‘yes,’ I would have never started covering the Trump administration in the Department of Justice. I would have never gotten the reporting chops through that. I would never have gotten a chance at anchoring. I would never have gotten a chance at so many different things. And it just took that one ‘yes,'” Laura says.
“I’m so grateful that CNN took a chance. It was a wild card, but it worked. And I’m so grateful to Savannah for giving me that nudge because sometimes you also just need someone to give you a little push.”
It’s also Savannah’s work ethic that Laura says sets the bar high at TODAY, inspiring her and everyone else to bring their “A” game each and every day.
“Every time we’re on the plaza, there’s some little girl who’s come there, who wants to be Savannah Guthrie, that she doesn’t even know that she’s touched. But she has inspired them in some way and that’s a beautiful thing to watch,” Laura explains.
As for the advice Laura would give to the next generation of aspiring journalists, the TODAY co-anchor recommends staying the course and never losing sight of goals.
“Take the chance. Even if it doesn’t work out the first time, even if it doesn’t work out the 50th time. If you’re passionate about it, you don’t want to regret not trying.”
Dylan Dreyer: ‘I am who I am because I said “yes.”‘
Meteorologist, weather correspondent and co-host of 3rd Hour of TODAY, Dylan Dreyer has never been one to back down from a challenge. In fact, just the opposite.
“I was one of two girls in my graduating class at Rutgers University in meteorology. That’s a huge school and we had a big meteorology department and I was one of two girls. And I never thought anything of it because it’s what I wanted to do. It’s what I put my mind to,” Dylan tells TODAY.com.
“I never thought of myself as different from anyone else. I was just going to work hard and do it.”
It’s that tenacity that helped put Dylan in the co-host chair at TODAY, despite encountering her fair share of hurdles on her way to getting there. “When it came time to enter the career of meteorology and TV, I got a lot of ‘no’s’ just from sending my tape out,” she explains, saying that at the time, she was still “very green.”
It was then-news director Phil Hayes at WICU in Erie, Pennsylvania, who gave the young meteorologist her first big break.
“(He) was the first person who gave me a chance. Not because I was where I needed to be at that point, because he said, ‘I see your potential,'” says Dylan. “When you can find someone who sees your potential, it gives you something to strive for and it gives you almost a goal you didn’t know you needed. But the fact that he thought I could do this gave me the confidence that, well maybe I can do this.”
Though she achieved success, Dylan says she still had to work with multiple voice coaches and even a personality coach to become TV-ready. She ultimately learned in the process was to simply be herself.
“That’s always been my thing, is to be who you are. And there will be people who like you for that and there’ll be people who don’t like you,” says Dylan. “But don’t change who you are because you think you have to fit into the mold of what has always been or what is expected of you. You need to do you.”
Even after landing on TODAY, Dylan says that she’s remained true to who she is as a person, something that’s important to her. “I’m so glad I don’t have to go home and shake it off and be someone I’m not, you know? What you see is what you get.”
As for other young women looking to study meteorology, science, journalism, television or anything that may seem out of reach, Dylan recommends staying committed to the dream and leaving the door open to opportunity.
“I never had a goal to be at the TODAY show. I thought I was going to set up shop in Boston. I met my husband up there and we were just going to buy a house and live in Boston. Then this opportunity came along. But I always said ‘yes’ to the opportunities,” she says.
“I am who I am because I said ‘yes.’ So even if something’s scary, even if people are trying to say you need this or that, say ‘yes’ to all of it and just absorb it all and you’ll get where you want to go whether that was your goal or not.”
Jenna Bush Hager: ‘(I put) myself outside the comfort zone’
By virtue of being the granddaughter of former U.S. President George H.W. Bush and daughter of former President George W. Bush, Jenna Bush Hager is already well-established in the history books.
But it’s on TODAY that she’s written her own story, first as a correspondent in 2009 and now as the host of TODAY with Jenna & Friends.
Jenna first appeared on TODAY in 2008, when she visited the show to promote her book, “Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope,” the nonfiction story of a 17-year-old mother born with HIV and her fight to protect her own unborn child.
According to Jenna, it was the “yes” moment that launched her television career. “I wrote a book and the TODAY show asked if I would come and be interviewed for my book. Even though previously I’d done very little in television, I said, ‘Yes,'” the host tells TODAY.com.
“The executive producer called afterwards and said, ‘Would you ever want to work here?'” Jenna recalls.
“So, that ‘yes’ to putting myself outside the comfort zone and not only writing somebody else’s story, but also coming to talk about it on live television, was the ‘yes’ that changed everything.”
From starting out as a correspondent and contributor on the show to being named as co-host of TODAY with Hoda & Jenna in April of 2019, Jenna has created a legacy on daytime television. The book club she launched in 2019, Read With Jenna, has promoted more than 75 titles and created a community of readers worldwide.
As for the legacy the former schoolteacher, author and talk show host hopes to leave behind, Jenna says she’d like it to be one of happiness that comes from viewers enjoying the show.
“In particular, I think we hope that it’s joyful. We hope to bring joy. We hope that if you watch me, you watch our show, that you leave feeling a little better than you did before. So, that’s what I hope is my contribution, is joy.”
