From local television to White House correspondent Woodruff applied for her first job in journalism during the spring break of her senior year at Duke. Besides being a secretary, she presented the weather forecast on Sundays in her last six months at the station. She covered the
Georgia State Legislature, and anchored the noon and evening news. She had already covered Carter's second gubernatorial campaign in 1970 for WAGA. Woodruff traveled with Carter's presidential campaign until she was taken off the campaign trail halfway through 1976. Although she was not on the campaign trail anymore, she kept reporting about the Carter campaign for NBC. She continued covering the White House into the
Reagan presidency until 1982. Subsequently, she was Chief Washington correspondent for
The Today Show on NBC for a year. Woodruff started hosting the weekly documentary series
Frontline with Judy Woodruff a few months later in 1984 after its presenter
Jessica Savitch died in October the year before. Woodruff left
Frontline in 1990 to spend more time with her family and at the
NewsHour. While at PBS, she covered all presidential conventions and campaigns, and moderated the 1988 vice-presidential debate between United States Senators
Dan Quayle (R-IN) and
Lloyd Bentsen (D-TX). In June 1993, Woodruff started anchoring the political talk show
Inside Politics, that aired on weekdays, together with
Bernard Shaw, and the international news program
The World Today together with
Frank Sesno. Sesno was replaced by Shaw in May 1994. When the daily world affairs program
CNN WorldView was launched in 1995, Woodruff and Shaw became the hosts. She remained co-anchor of
WorldView until it went off the air in 2001. In February 2001, Shaw retired, causing Woodruff to become the sole host of
Inside Politics, which was subsequently renamed ''Judy Woodruff's Inside Politics''. During her time at CNN, Woodruff also co-anchored CNN's election coverage and the news shows
Live From... and
CNN NewsStand on Wednesdays. She was the sole anchor of the 1996 documentary series
Democracy in America as well. She reported on the
1995 World Conference on Women in
Beijing, and co-anchored CNN's special coverage of, among other things,
President Richard Nixon's funeral, the
Centennial Olympic Park bombing,
9/11, the
War in Afghanistan, the
Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, and the
Iraq War. Woodruff moderated three Republican presidential primary debates and one Democratic debate during the
2000 campaign season and one Democratic debate during the
2004 campaign season. Woodruff left CNN in June 2005, after her contract expired, in order to teach, write, and work on a
long-form television project. She was a
visiting fellow at the
Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at
Harvard University in the fall of 2005, and taught a course at the
Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University on media and politics in the fall of 2006. Additionally, Woodruff started hosting
Conversations with Judy Woodruff, a monthly
Bloomberg Television program, in which she interviewed people, in 2006. She also hosted the Bloomberg election night coverage of the
2006 midterms. Woodruff continued presenting
Conversations with Judy Woodruff until 2013. Woodruff returned to
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as a special correspondent that same year, and became a senior correspondent a few months later in February 2007. As a senior correspondent, she reported, conducted studio interviews, was part of the political team, and occasionally filled in as anchor. Lehrer stepped down as anchor of the
NewsHour in June 2011, which resulted in the news program being anchored by Woodruff, Ifill, Brown,
Ray Suarez, and
Margaret Warner on a rotating basis. Earlier that year, the documentary
Nancy Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, of which Woodruff was the principal reporter, was released. It was the first time an American network broadcast had been anchored by two women. When Ifill died in November 2016, Woodruff became the sole anchor of the
NewsHour. During the 2020 presidential election season, she was one of the moderators of the
sixth Democratic debate. In 2017,
The New York Times wrote of her performance on the
NewsHour: "Ms. Woodruff's measured delivery, with her hands clasped and her voice low, stands as a counterweight to a haywire era of American news." In May 2022, Woodruff announced that she would step down as the
NewsHour anchor at the end of the year, but planned to continue contributing to the program as senior correspondent. Her last day anchoring the program was December 30, 2022. ==Other activities and accolades==