Ina Jaffe, an NPR correspondent for roughly 40 years who was known for her unflinching approach to journalism and was the first editor of the network’s initial iteration of the weekly national news show “Weekend Edition Saturday,” died on Thursday. She was 75.
NPR confirmed her death in an article, which did not say where she died. Ms. Jaffe had been living with metastatic breast cancer for several years.
Often described by colleagues as a “reporter’s reporter,” Ms. Jaffe had a keen sense of the line separating the equitable and the unjust. The breadth of her journalistic expertise grew over the decades, beginning with the politics beat and evolving in later years to analyses that chronicled what it means to grow older in America.
In addition to “Weekend Edition,” she contributed stories for the daily afternoon news program “All Things Considered.”
In 2011, Ms. Jaffe reported on the Department of Veterans Affairs in Los Angeles leasing large areas of its campus that had been intended to house homeless veterans to unrelated businesses. In part because of a series of stories that she reported, the administration slated more land to be developed to provide housing for homeless veterans. In 2018, two men involved in the lease deals were sentenced on fraud charges.
The series won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists and a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media.
The principles that Ms. Jaffe applied to her reporting helped her newsroom colleagues build their armor for the confrontational work of reporting. One journalist, Sonari Glinton, recalled for NPR how she counseled him when he was in a heated conversation with an upset publicist after a story aired.
Ms. Jaffe “got up from her desk, walked around and said, ‘Don’t apologize for doing your job,’” Mr. Glinton said. “‘Don’t apologize for being a journalist.’”
Ina Jaffe was born in 1948 in Chicago, and attended the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, and DePaul University, where she received a doctorate in the subject.
By the 1970s, she was performing onstage with the Organic Theater group and other productions in Chicago in stage performances that included sci-fi shows and renditions of Shakespeare plays.
In a 1977 review for The Chicago Tribune, a critic wrote that “Jaffe was an effective, sweet and sassy Miranda” for a production of “The Enchanted Island.” One of Ms. Jaffe’s duets, the critic wrote, “was the highlight of the show.”
Her artistic sensibilities became a part of her reporting process, as she began to cover politics for NPR’s fledgling Chicago bureau in the early 1980s. One of her colleagues, Scott Simon, recalled that he once noticed she carried newspaper clippings in an artist’s portfolio.
“She had an artist’s eye for detail, and a performer’s ear for the ring and rhyme of human speech,” Mr. Simon wrote in a reflection after Ms. Jaffe’s death.
Ms. Jaffe and Mr. Simon both moved to Washington, D.C., and started “Weekend Edition,” which debuted in 1985.
Ms. Jaffe covered national elections for NPR since 2008. In 2010, she received a Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association for her reporting on California’s disciplinary three-strikes law imposing harsher penalties for what were often minor or nonviolent criminal offenses, which potentially put thousands of people on track to serve decades in prison.
In 2011, her investigation into violence at psychiatric hospitals in California won an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award as well as a Gracie Award.
Her survivors include her husband, Lenny Kleinfeld.
In her later years at NPR, she focused on a beat she created, which covered older Americans in politics, retirement, fashion and their personal lives, and decisions made at the ends of their lives.
“We don’t give ourselves opportunities anymore for different generations to meet each other,” she said in a 2019 speech about her work.
In 2021, Ms. Jaffe wrote a column in which she disclosed her cancer diagnosis. The article was a balance of confession, introspection and an objective look at how the disease affects the mind and bodies of different populations.
“The primary reason for disclosing my secret: outrage,” she wrote. In her research, she found that “only 7 percent of funding for breast cancer research is devoted to metastatic disease,” a particularly deadly form of breast cancer.
That willingness to look inward, mixed with the dogged pursuit of facts, was what made Ms. Jaffe magnetic and admirable to many of her colleagues.
In his column, Mr. Simon remembered a saying of Ms. Jaffe’s that served as a through line of her reporting: “Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry, make ’em come back for more.”
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