How Savannah Guthrie Lost Her First Job 4 Days After She Started

Having a career in media isn’t always an easy route. With the constant shifts happening in the industry, many people are bound to job hop, or worse, be laid off or fired. And it happened early on in Savannah Guthrie’s career. While appearing as a guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she discussed landing a job at a news station in Butte, Montana, after college. She believed it would be her big break. But days later, the job was over.

Due to the station being in one of the smallest television markets in the country, she was offered a very small salary, “the sum of $13,000 a year,” she said. There were also little resources. “I was my own camera person. My own editor. I would lug that stuff around, but I was excited it was my big break. I was Butte, Montana’s Diane Sawyer,” she recalled. 

Within 10 days, the higher-ups called a staff meeting with “about four people” in attendance to share disappointing news. “They closed the station,” Guthrie said, adding, “I was devastated. As kind of crappy as that job was, I was so lucky to get it.” The station was the NBC affiliate KTVM-TV in Butte.

She learned early on that moving on was part of the gig. Guthrie drove back home to Tucson, Arizona, and began shopping her tapes around. She eventually landed at another news station. Ironically, she’d end up back at NBC 25 years later, just on a larger scale. Now, she’s working at Today as one of the popular morning program’s co-anchors and an NBC chief legal correspondent.

Before beginning her work journey, Guthrie received a B.A. in journalism from the University of Arizona. She later earned her Juris Doctor from Georgetown University Law Center, and received the highest score on the Arizona Bar exam in the year she took it.