The News Sorority

"Weller rivetingly recounts these gutsy ladies' time on the front lines... an inspiration for future generations of journalists." --Vanity Fair

For decades, women battered the walls of the male fortress of television journalism. After fierce struggles, three women-Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, and Christiane Amanpour-broke into the newsroom's once impenetrable "boys' club." These women were not simply pathbreakers, but wildly gifted journalists whose unique talents enabled them to climb to the top of the corporate ladder and transform the way Americans received their news.

Drawing on exclusive interviews with their colleagues and intimates from childhood on, The News Sorority crafts a lively and exhilarating narrative that reveals the hard struggles and inner strengths that shaped these women and powered their success. Life outside the newsroom-love, loss, child rearing-would mark them all, complicating their lives even as it deepened their convictions and instincts. Life inside the newsroom would include many nervy decisions and back room power plays previously uncaptured in any media account. Taken together, Sawyer's, Couric's, and Amanpour's lives as women are here revealed not as impediments but as keys to their success.

Raised in Louisville, Kentucky, Diane Sawyer was a young woman steering her own unique political course in a time of societal upheaval. Her fierce intellect, almost insuperable work ethic, and sophisticated emotional intelligence would catapult Sawyer from being the first female on-air correspondent for 60 Minutes, to presenting anchoring the network flagship ABC World News. From her first breaks as a reporter all the way through her departure in 2014, Sawyer's charisma and drive would carry her through countless personal and professional changes.

Katie Couric, always conveniently underestimated because of her "girl-next-door" demeanor, brazened her way through a succession of regional TV news jobs until she finally hit it big. In