An Evening With Judy Woodruff (8/28/26)

Make plans now to join us at the Camden Opera House on Friday, August 28 at 7:30 p.m. when veteran journalist Judy Woodruff, PBS NewsHour senior correspondent and former anchor and managing editor, will share insights from her five decades of news reporting in An Evening with Judy Woodruff, sponsored by The Camden Conference. An icon of in-depth reporting and journalistic integrity, Woodruff will be interviewed onstage by Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, executive director of The Maine Monitor, Maine’s independent, nonprofit investigative news service.

Judy 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 in a time when broadcast news was dominated by male anchors and reporters. In the 1976 presidential campaign NBC News assigned Woodruff to cover a little-known 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 of NewsHour and host of the weekly documentary series Frontline with Judy Woodruff. In 1993 she moved to CNN, where she co-anchored, with Bernard Shaw, 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 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.”

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).