She has been a reporter, columnist and San Francisco Bureau Chief of The New York Times, a national political correspondent for the Washington Post and San Francisco reporter for the Associated Press. She has also written for Salon.com, Alternet.org and other publications. She covers impoverished communities in the United States, especially in Indian County and Appalachia. Recently, she completed an in-depth profile of The Three Affilated Tribes, which has been transformed by the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota, for Barbara Ehrenreich’s Economic Inequality Reporting Project.