Montagne got her start in radio as news director for KPOO community radio in San Francisco while attending UC–Berkeley. She also worked for Pacific News Service in San Francisco.[2]
From 1980 through 1986, she worked in New York City as a freelance reporter and producer for both NPR and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. During this period, she covered the arts and science for NPR. From 1987 to 1989, she was co-host with Robert Siegel of NPR's evening news magazine, All Things Considered.[6]
In 1990, Montagne covered the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa. She remained in South Africa for three years focusing on the area, where she won, along with the NPR reporting team, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award for their coverage of South Africa's first fully democratic elections.[7]
Montagne (far left) interviewing British Brigadier General David Paterson in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2010
In May 2004, Montagne and Steve Inskeep became interim co-hosts for NPR's Morning Edition, replacing long-time host Bob Edwards who was reassigned as a senior correspondent.[8] They became permanent co-hosts in December 2004.
The following year, Montagne went to Rome to cover the funeral of Pope John Paul II for NPR's Morning Edition. She also has traveled frequently to Afghanistan to report on the war that began in 2001. She has been recognized by the Overseas Press Club for her work from Afghanistan.[2]
The announcement went public on July 18, 2016, that Montagne would be leaving NPR's Morning Edition after co-hosting it with Steve Inskeep for 12 years.
Her final Morning Edition as co-host was November 11, 2016. A month later, as Special Correspondent/Occasional Host for NPR News, Montagne embarked on a new project: an NPR/collaboration called Lost Mothers.
Montagne, along with ProPublica reporting partner Nina Martin, spent the next year investigating why women are far more likely to die due to giving birth in the U.S. than all other developed nations.
Their investigation focused on why the maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is going up while it's going down in nearly every other nation; why African-American women are 3-to-4 times more likely to die than white women; and what's being done to reverse these dire statistics. The series set off a national conversation at a time when few Americans knew that, in the U.S., even a healthy woman with a perfect pregnancy and good health care risks dying, or nearly dying, in childbirth.
The stories, aired and published from 2017 through mid-2018, has been credited with inspiring laws in several states, as well as bills at the federal level aimed at protecting birthing mothers. In a 2018 Forbes op-ed[10] arguing for a federal law to end America's “maternal death epidemic,” Senator Tammy Duckworth cited the NPR/ProPublica investigation Lost Mothers. Duckworth also linked directly to Montagne's NPR story on how California succeeded in cutting in half its maternal mortality rate. On 12/21/2018 HR 1318 “Preventing Maternal Deaths Act” was signed into law – a law that incorporated the Senate bill Duckworth had championed in the op-ed.
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