On a humid February afternoon last year, Jane Clayson Johnson trudged through the dense forest with her guide, Grace Ninsiima, a young mother from Masaka, a city in central Uganda. Johnson, who spent her career in high-profile broadcast roles at ABC News and CBS News, had come to Africa to interview Ninsiima and several others for “Pathway to Hope,” a documentary exploring the transformative power of education in their lives.
The women pause as Ninsiima points out endaggu, a Ugandan plant that kept her and her four daughters fed when they fled Ninsiima’s abusive marriage, hiding in a one-room shed with a leaky roof.
“So you find the root of this plant and you peel it, it’s like potato,” Ninsiima tells Johnson at one point in the film, pulling a bunch of leafy twigs. She’s a graduate of the BYU-Pathway program and is now a BYU-Pathway area manager in Africa Central.
“Do you dig this up?” Johnson asks, looking down at the leaf in her hand.
“Yeah, we would dig it up,” Ninsiima responds. Sometimes it took her hours to find enough food to feed five people and there were times when the search ended with nothing. “And it meant no dinner that night,” Johnson says. “Yeah, no dinner,” Ninsiima confirms.
Just down from that same forest, Johnson later told me, was where Ninsiima first met the missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; sponsored by the church, the BYU-Pathway program helped her get on her feet. After hearing Ninsiima’s story, Johnson, who is also a Latter-day Saint, knew she wanted to share it.
Over the years at major network outlets, Johnson interviewed U.S. presidents and politicians like George W. Bush and Colin Powell, as well as public figures such as Tom Hanks and Yo-Yo Ma. Her face appeared on every bus in New York City, and each morning, a limo whisked her to the studio on Fifth Avenue to co-anchor the Early Show on CBS News. Every week, she cooked with Martha Stewart on her show and even made the front page of the New York Daily News after pressing the homemaking icon on the insider stock trading allegations. For the past two decades, Johnson has guest hosted programs produced at WBUR in Boston and nationally syndicated by NPR.
Yet, it was sitting with Ninsiima and other students in their homes in Uganda and Kenya and witnessing their resilience amid poverty and sickness, that brought into focus the humanity that always motivated her work. “Their vulnerability and their willingness to share their lives with me — I find that to be almost a sacred responsibility, that they would trust me,” Johnson told me recently as we sat in her red-accented living room in Belmont, a suburb of Boston where she’s lived for nearly 20 years.
Johnson has always been unafraid to confront the most difficult and uncomfortable parts of human experience — even while living through them — and then to give these experiences words, so she could begin to make sense of the deeper meaning.
Jane Clayson Johnson and McKay Coppins bring you “Deseret Voices,” a new podcast debuting Thursday, Nov. 13. Subscribe now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
After walking away from her star-studded career to become a mother, she candidly wrote about the shift in her 2007 memoir “I Am a Mother.” A decade later, after going through a crushing bout of depression, Johnson tried turning the pain that almost broke her into the connective tissue with those, who like her, were struggling. She went on to spend three years interviewing over 150 people, all Latter-day Saints, and documenting their stories, and her own, in “Silent Souls Weeping.”
When I visited Johnson in October, she was still recovering from the marathon of post-production of “Pathway to Hope” that had aired just a week earlier. She had started with 90 hours of footage after the Africa trip and had to whittle it down to a one-hour film. “When I finish a big project, it’s like having a baby,” she told me, laughing. She had also just returned from Salt Lake City, where she interviewed the new leadership for the Church of Jesus Christ.
But rest isn’t exactly in sight.
She’ll co-host Deseret Voices, a new Deseret News podcast, with McKay Coppins, a staff writer at The Atlantic and fellow Latter-day Saint, where the two will have long-form, meaty conversations with influential public figures on topics like ethics of AI, grief and leadership and the future of conservatism in the post-Trump era.
Johnson sees the podcast as another resource for people in the confusing and often aggravating time of division. “I want to help people get a real sense of how we can be better, how we can lift instead of destroy,” she said.
‘I am like a little pencil’
Johnson is happier being the one asking questions. “I’m inherently a shy person,” she tells me. She’s gracious and open, but she admits that she’d rather be curled up with a book by a fireplace or play a board game with her kids. I can hear her husband, Mark, on the phone talking, but her home is mostly quiet these days: her son William is on a Latter-day Saint mission in Stockholm, Sweden; her 21-year-old daughter Ella is a senior in college in St. Louis. Her caregiving looks different now: her mother’s been sick and recently moved out of her home into an assisted living facility a mile away. Johnson’s husband serves as bishop of a congregation of young single adults, who often visit their home.
Johnson has a low, measured voice, and at 58, her beauty has acquired depth and grace that only comes with time.
Johnson, the oldest of three children, was born in Salt Lake City, but she grew up on the move, following her father’s medical career. She spent seven years of her childhood in Boston while he trained at Harvard Medical School, then a year in Aberdeen, Scotland. The family later lived in Nashville, Tenn., Seattle, Wash., and Sacramento, Calif., where Johnson attended high school. The frequent moves were good for her, she said, pushing her to step outside her comfort zone.
Growing up, the news was always on, usually PBS News Hour, and the family gathered each evening to watch the nightly broadcast. “My parents wanted to make sure we understood what was happening in the world,” she recalled. As a teen, she devoured Time magazine from cover to cover each week, captivated by dispatches from far-away lands.
When she was a freshman at BYU, Johnson’s brother David, who was 10 years old at the time, got extremely sick and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. “I remember begging the Lord to give him strength, to make him well,” she wrote in “I Am a Mother.” But radiation and chemotherapy didn’t work, and David died within a year.
For years after, Johnson questioned why this tragedy had happened to her family, she told me.
Only with time, she began to see the transformative byproducts of that loss — her capacity for empathy expanded all while she clung to God to make sense of the unexplainable. “It helped me understand what it means to mourn with those that mourn, what it means to comfort others who are in crisis and take an experience that’s painful and shift it around, so I focus outward,” she said.
In college, she once stumbled on Mother Teresa’s quote in Time magazine: “I am like a little pencil in (God’s) hand. That is all.” This description of the act of surrender to God resonated with Johnson.
She too, in her own way, wanted to be like that pencil.
‘My career chose me’
Johnson’s living room is like a cabinet of curiosities from her international assignments: shadow puppets from Jakarta, Indonesia, where she covered student uprising and the fall of the Suharto government; the Japanese screen called “byobu” from her ABC News bureau stint in Tokyo; folk art figures from a trip to Mexico City, where she interviewed President Vicente Fox at the presidential palace.
Her stairwell wall is lined with photographs from the big news moments: her shaking hands with Al Gore, her and George Clooney on the “Fail Safe” movie set, a photo and personalized thank you note from Johnson’s visit on the David Letterman show, her and Dan Rather reporting on the one-year anniversary of 9/11.
Johnson often says she never set out to build a high-profile career in broadcast journalism, write books or make documentaries. Her plan had been simpler: graduate, get married, raise children.
“I don’t feel like I necessarily chose my career,” she told me. “I always felt like my career chose me.”
While waiting for her idyllic vision to materialize, she followed her curiosities.
She entered Brigham Young University on a violin performance scholarship — she was even named after Janie Thompson, the founder of BYU’s Young Ambassadors, who had mentored Johnson’s mother, also a violinist. But Johnson became captivated by the news operation after visiting KBYU. “Something connected with me at that moment,” she said. “I fell in love with the energy of the newsroom, with the real-time news-making experience.”
Johnson admits she is sensitive and prone to “over-empathizing” with her sources. Her eyes well up when she talks about the students she met in Africa. But this gentleness has become something of a superpower, especially when paired with her unflinching perseverance.
After spotting a flyer about the KSL internship deadline, she drove her application there herself. Hired first part-time and later full-time, she approached seasoned journalists with one request: help her get better. “I don’t want you to tell me what’s really good,” she recalled telling her producers. “I just want you to tell me how to improve.”
Janice Evans, executive producer at KSL at the time, who had recently returned after six years at CBS, responded to her request. Johnson was quiet, yet determined, Evans told me. “She was one of my most earnest and accomplished students,” said Evans, who is still friends with Johnson.
At KSL, Johnson won an Edward R. Murrow award and regional Emmy for a story about a boy with cancer who dreamed of dying by the ocean and a wealthy couple who made his wish a reality. “One thing about Jane is that every time she does a story, she gets better. That’s part of her drive,” Evans said. “Jane is a perfectionist.”
Producers from major news markets began to notice Johnson’s talent. One day, an agent in New York called after seeing her work on another reporter’s tape submitted for a job application. “I was in shock, I wasn’t expecting that,” she recalled. The job offer required her to move to Los Angeles to work for ABC News affiliates nationwide. She had also gotten married, and her hopes of a happy family life seemed within reach.
In Los Angeles, her career soared: She covered the O.J. Simpson trial, NATO airstrikes on Kosovo, and the ensuing refugee crisis in Macedonia. But her personal life was unraveling — her marriage deteriorated and ended in divorce, and she suddenly felt “lost at the bottom of a great hole deep in the earth,” she later wrote.
She threw herself into work, even more relentlessly than before. In 1999, she was recruited to become the co-anchor of The Early Show on CBS News with Bryant Gumbel. The new job was exhilarating, but it also pushed her to the edge of her physical and emotional limits.
She woke at 3:30 a.m. to prepare for the 7 a.m. show, often staying up until 9 p.m. to tape interviews and prepare for the next day. “There wasn’t much sleep,” Evans recalled, who went to CBS News with Johnson for six months to get her trained for the Early Morning show.
Her Latter-day Saint faith drew curiosity from colleagues and reporters: Why didn’t she drink coffee? What about polygamy? At times, she felt like a “display at a department store.” Yet, she also felt a responsibility to represent her faith in the public eye.
The commitment to being the conduit for others’ stories and not the story herself, helped her calibrate her relationship with fame. She found it “superficial” and “not very meaningful,” she told me.
” I never tried to get too high and never tried to get too low,” she said. “I just always stayed steady.”
Stepping away to become a mother
In 2003, while still in New York, 36-year-old Johnson married Mark Johnson, graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard Business School, who co-founded the consulting firm Innosight with the late Clayton Christensen, a renowned business professor and a Latter-day Saint. Her CBS contract was ending, and she felt ready for a quieter season.
Johnson’s colleagues thought she was crazy to decline the lucrative contract, to return to ABC News, she had been offered. But to her, the decision felt right, and even now, she has no regrets.
Johnson moved to Boston to completely devote herself to motherhood, caring for Mark’s three children and, eventually, their two children together.
“I never wanted my career to define my life,” she told me. “I had always wanted a family of my own, so when I had that opportunity, I knew that I wanted to focus on being a mother wholly and completely.”
In a 2004 Boston Globe article about Johnson’s departure, Susan Zirinsky, executive producer of CBS’s 48 Hours, wrote this: “She’s a hungry young girl, but it wasn’t exactly what she wanted. She didn’t need ego gratification.”
Still, the transition was not easy. Her son William was born prematurely, weighing two pounds and four ounces, and stayed in the NICU for three months. Almost every day, laden with freshly pumped breast milk, she traveled to the hospital to feed William, all while caring for a toddler.
While cleaning up spilled Cheerios from the floor, she’d sometimes look up and see a former colleague on TV reporting a major story. “What have I done?” she’d think. During nighttime feedings, she poured her raw, new feelings about motherhood onto a yellow pad (these sketches later became her book “I Am a Mother.”)
But slowly, Johnson began to let go of the old story of success, measured in accolades and achievement, and embrace a richer and more nuanced understanding of what it meant to thrive. She later wrote: “I believe, from the depths of my heart, that a righteous mother is the embodiment of success.”
This time for Johnson was also marked by an unexpected onset of severe depression. What had once been occasional “situational sadness,” as she described it, began to sink deeper, affecting her every day. Without telling anyone, Johnson described looking for a “replacement” of herself for her children, devising a plan to end her life. “I felt broken and worthless,” she wrote in “Silent Souls Weeping,” published by Deseret Book in 2018.
With the support of medication and therapy, she gradually began to heal and felt a growing urge to use her experience to tell others’ stories of mental illness.
Up until the book came out, she worried she had made a “terrible mistake” by sharing her story, she told me. Then the emails began pouring in — messages from readers thanking her for giving their struggles a voice. “The moment I realized my story could be a conduit for others to tell theirs, that made it all worthwhile,” Johnson said. She can now recognize the signs of depression in someone from a distance.
Following instincts
Johnson told me that while she was recently recovering from the flu, she received a WhatsApp message from one of the students in Africa featured in her documentary. The young woman wrote to say she had malaria and typhoid at the same time.
The disparity between her own circumstances and those of her subjects weighs on her.
“I had just come from one of the best medical facilities in the world in Boston,” Johnson said. “And there she was, struggling to get to a clinic.”
But she tries to put her empathy to action.
Faith Namusoke, a baker in Kampala, Uganda, said Johnson gave her the boost to start her own baking business after completing a certificate through the BYU–Pathway program. “She has a golden heart, a kind heart,” Namusoke told me. “It has helped me move forward, even when I felt discouraged.” Every week, Johnson buys one of her cakes online — Namusoke makes it and then gives it away to someone in need. “It has changed our lives,” Namusoke said.
These stories are resonating: The documentary has passed over a million streams and about 500 service missionaries have signed up to volunteer with the BYU-Pathway program.
Just like in her broadcast days, Johnson is relentless with her research, Chantelle Squires, the producer who worked closely with Johnson on the documentary, told me. “She really understands people’s situations.”
But even then, Johnson is responding to the subtle nudges that she can’t always explain. “She listens to her instincts. If she feels something’s missing, she’ll dig until she finds it,” Squires told me.
Today, Johnson describes her career as a kind of Venn diagram of her work at WBUR, projects for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, her service on the board of the U.S. Naval Institute, and now the Deseret Voices podcast. She wants to make more documentaries. The work is varied, and it’s no longer constrained by the relentless rhythm of daily news or mothering small children.
“I’m not a rigid person,” she said. “I don’t have tunnel vision. If I feel like something is opening up, I follow it.”