Nancy Weaver Teichert, BA’76, spent her career as a beat reporter and investigative journalist at the Jackson (Miss.) Clarion-Ledger, the Denver Post and, for the last 20 years of her career, the Sacramento Bee. She retired in 2006.
At the Clarion-Ledger, she was part of a reporting team that won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a campaign supporting the Mississippi governor’s efforts to reform the state’s education system.
Also at the Clarion-Ledger, she won other national journalism awards, including the 1978 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award Grand Prize for Outstanding Coverage of the Problems of the Disadvantaged, and she contributed to the paper’s winning the Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting and the Roy W. Howard National Journalism Public Service Award.
While at the Bee, she received the 1993 Alan Shawn Feinstein World Hunger Media Award. She contributed to a series called “A Madness Called Meth,” about methamphetamines, which won the 2001 Nancy Dickerson White award for reporting on drug issues. In 2004, Teichert received the American Society on Aging Media Award for her work on issues related to aging.
At the school’s centennial banquet in 2011, Teichert’s husband surprised her by announcing the establishment of a scholarship at the school in her name. The Nancy Weaver Teichert Scholarship in Journalism, which supports students who specialize in investigative journalism, was first awarded in 2012.
As an IU journalism student, Teichert won numerous awards, including the Women in Communication Scholarship, the Scripps Howard Ernie Pyle Scholarship, the Sally Cooper Scholarship and the Poynter Fund Scholarship.
Teichert said in a school report shortly after the scholarship was announced that she had planned to create a scholarship at the School of Journalism as part of her estate, and was touched and gratified by her husband’s surprise.
“I wouldn’t have made it through college without the scholarships I received,” she said.