Gwen Ifill, 'Adored' PBS Anchor, Dead At 61

BOSTON, MA – Gwen Ifill, a groundbreaking journalist known for her steady hand as the co-anchor of "PBS NewsHour" and as managing editor of "Washington Week," died Monday, according to NPR and other media outlets.

According to a statement from PBS, Ifill passed away this afternoon after months of cancer treatment, surrounded by family and friends.

"Gwen was a standard bearer for courage, fairness and integrity in an industry going through seismic change," said Sara Just, "PBS NewsHour" executive producer. "She was a mentor to so many across the industry and her professionalism was respected across the political spectrum."

Ifill was born and partially raised in the Queens borough of New York City, where her father, Oliver Urcille Ifill Sr., was a minister for the Trinity A.M.E. Church. Throughout her childhood, her father's job would also take her to Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and upstate New York.

Read also: The Optimism of Gwen Ifill

Ifill, a 1977 graduate of Simmons College in Boston, was known for her steady hand as the co-anchor of "PBS NewsHour." Ifill was also the managing editor of "Washington Week" and bestselling author of "The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama."

Ifill came to PBS in 1999. Before that, she was the chief congressional and political correspondent for NBC News, the White House correspondent for the New York Times and a local and national political reporter for The Washington Post, according to PBS. She was also a reporter with the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Boston Herald American.

Ifill moderated the 2008 vice presidential debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden.

When Ifill was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2012, she said she wanted to be a journalist since she was 9 years old.

"We are of color. We were born that way. It means that we bring a world view to our work that is too often missing," she said in her prepared remarks. "But we don't choose between being black and being journalists. We just want to tell all the stories, and tell them well, to the broadest possible audiences."

Just wrote that Ifill's audience "adored her" because they felt they knew her.

"She was stopped on the street routinely by people who just wanted to give her a hug and considered her a friend after years of seeing her on TV," Just wrote.

Earlier this year, Ifill told a group at Colorado College that she still preferred to hold a physical newspaper, a preference that came out of her first job as a newspaper reporter. In the same speech, she said that for as long as she had been a journalist, people have said that journalism is about to die.

"I'm optimistic about the way we get our information. I'm sometimes less optimistic about our willingness to do it," she said. "But we can do it. We can figure it out."

To read Ifill's prepared remarks from the 2012 NABJ Hall of Fame induction ceremony, click here.

Simone Wilson contributed to this report. Patch will update this story

Image courtesy of PBS NewsHour