A Harvard graduate, he spent 10 years at the Associated Press. From 1989 to 1997, he covered New England for the Washington Post. He holds a master’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina, where he was a co-author of the prize-winning 1987 book Like a Family, a social history of the South’s industrialization. His writing has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Columbia Journalism Review, Parents, New England Monthly, Boston, American Prospect and other magazines. He contributes freelance articles and essays to newspapers and magazines, and he is the author of a prize-winning history of U.S. journalism, Covering America: A Narrative History of a Nation’s Journalism.