Martin's mentor and boss was the paper's domineering and mercurial editor, Cissy Patterson. One author says that in the 1930s Martin was often credited with "almost single-handedly transforming William Randolph Hearst's tired "Herald" into what was to become Cissy Patterson's sleek, eye-catching "Times-Herald"." In 1936 Martin and Patterson visited a rural section of Tennessee and North Carolina to produce a series of six articles called "Dixie's Dead End." One of the articles described the hardships faced by two elderly farm women at the height of the depression. The image at left comes from this shoot. In August 1940 Martin left the "Times-Herald" to begin a career as freelance photographer, publicist, war correspondent, lecturer, and magazine editor. Between 1940 and 1944 she seems never to have been at rest. At the beginning of that period she spent two seasons crossing the country as a paid lecturer as well as managing an advertising campaign for the Chrysler Corporation. She next traveled by air across Brazil to shoot aerial and ground photos for two books profiling that country. In the winter months of 1941 and spring of 1942 she set up a photo department for the Washington bureau of the "Chicago Sun-Times" and began work as associate editor of the "Woman's Home Companion". During the second half of 1942 she served as photographer and publicist for the first group of women to enter military service with the Army. In 1944 she obtained a contract from the Macmillan publishing company (of New York) for a book about nurses in the U.S. Army and was sent to Italy as war correspondent for "Ladies' Home Journal". Given the opportunity to witness the invasion of southern France, she broke the Macmillan contract and accompanied the 7th Army in its liberation of Marseilles, Lyon, and Toulon. During the war years Martin contributed freelance photos and features to widely-circulated U.S. magazines, including "Time", "The Saturday Evening Post", "Colliers", and "Look". She continued to produce freelance photojournalism after her return from Europe in 1945. For example, in May and June of that year she published articles in the "Washington Star" on the physical appearance of Army nurses ("Nurses Are Pretty," May 27, 1945) and on the friendliness of servicemen towards the children they encountered behind the lines ("Soldiers and Kids," June 3, 1945). The following year she served as feature editor and photographer in the Washington office of International News Photos and as photographer for King Features Syndicate, both owned by William Randolph Hearst for whom she had worked at the beginning of her career in journalism.