Ina Jaffe, an NPR correspondent for roughly 40 years who was known for her unflinching approach to journalism and was the first editor of the network’s initial iteration of the weekly national news show “Weekend Edition Saturday,” died on Thursday. She was 75.

NPR confirmed her death in an article, which did not say where she died. Ms. Jaffe had been living with metastatic breast cancer for several years.

Often described by colleagues as a “reporter’s reporter,” Ms. Jaffe had a keen sense of the line separating the equitable and the unjust. The breadth of her journalistic expertise grew over the decades, beginning with the politics beat and evolving in later years to analyses that chronicled what it means to grow older in America.

In addition to “Weekend Edition,” she contributed stories for the daily afternoon news program “All Things Considered.”

In 2012, Ms. Jaffe reported on the Department of Veterans Affairs in Los Angeles leasing large areas of its campus that had been intended to house homeless veterans to unrelated businesses. In part because of a series of stories that she reported, the administration slated more land to be developed to provide housing for homeless veterans. In 2018, two men involved in the lease deals were sentenced on fraud charges.

The series won an award from the Society of Professional Journalists and a Gracie Award from the Alliance for Women in Media.