Highbrow Magazine Contributing Writer Barbara Noe Kennedy is an award-winning writer and editor, who specializes in travel writing. She worked for more than 20 years for the National Geographic Book Division, and she has also written for the Washington Post, National Geographic Traveler, the Los Angeles Times, and Fodor's -- in addition to penning a few books. She is a recent Lowell Thomas travel journalism award winner. Barbara has traveled extensively around the world and, along with her husband, is actively involved in helping Zambian students achieve their education and career goals. She writes travel articles and film reviews for Highbrow Magazine.

I picked up a reporter’s notebook, handed it to him, and told him to bring a pen. Bob’s idea of showing emotion was to smile slightly, showing the well-­stimulated incisors. He didn’t smile. No doubt he thought, the kid’s acting up again, but . . . it’s his last day, and it was. I was thirty-­one and had been a reporter at the Times for four years, but I was leaving to go to Yale Law School. Except I’d just gotten a scoop and I couldn’t walk away from it.

Over the past five years, though, another kind of press criticism has come to prominence after a period of marginalization. This brand of press criticism takes a free and independent press as a necessity for life in a democratic society. Instead of seeking to delegitimize the press, these critics are simultaneously explaining the workings of the press to the public and holding it accountable in its role as the public’s representative and watchdog.

The idea that Felt simply changed his procedural and cultural spots because he was so offended by the misdeeds of the Nixon Administration requires an enormous amount of blind faith about human nature. Clearly FBI directors are much more overtly political than they once were. Finding FBI loyalty during the campaign inadequate because it now refuses to take direct orders from the White House (which it never has) may result in one of the more interesting and unreported power struggles of our day.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipino American journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who is arguably the most visible undocumented immigrant in America right now, has joined 10 other fellow undocumented immigrants in applying for temporary relief from deportation proceedings under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The 11 people applied for DACA as part of the “1 of 11 Million” campaign launched on Wednesday, August 20, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. 

Diversity has always been—and for a number of reasons still is—the china-crashing elephant in the room that few really want to talk about or address. Lack of black people in the mainstream newsroom is an ongoing phenomenon that most—if not all—outlets seem unwilling to fix. Even worse is the lack of black leadership in the newsroom. But the fact remains that most demographic segments, regardless of background, still rush to bigged-up brand-name institutions as their most reliable sources for news. That won’t and shouldn’t change if you’re a rapacious consumer of information. As a result, people of color should hold these vaunted publications’ collective feet to the fire.

In this day and age, there are few writers and journalists who fit the mold of the true literary great.  There is Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker ; Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times;  Louis Menand (also of the New Yorker); and Henry Allen, the Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist, formerly of the Washington Post. God, Allen can write. For a number of young Washington-area journalists of my generation who had our eyes on the Washington Post at the start of our careers, Henry Allen’s writings represented what we hoped to achieve: the ability to craft elegant, refined, effortless prose and to present every subject matter (even the most mundane) as important and interesting.

Before the  conservative Tea Party made a pun out of American politics, emptying out histories of collective struggle and liquidating the American social safety net in one jubilant protest (because chucking valuable resources into the Boston Harbor is mythical and fun), there was Sally Quinn. The Washington Post  moderator and writer for the “On Faith” site and “The Party” column (which the Post killed in print in February 2010) and wife of the Post’s former Executive Editor Benjamin Bradlee, Sally Quinn has always felt comfortable occupying that blurry nether-zone between serious journalism and social entertainment, between party politics and festive gatherings involving large numbers of influential politicians.