Trivia

Graduated from Asbury Park High School.

Founded a newsletter for an Elvis Presley fan club when she was twelve.

In 1965 she graduated from Monmouth University with a bachelor's degree in English.

After graduating from college she moved to Southern California and worked for The San Bernardino Sun for a short time.

Joined the Associated Press in January 1967 where she was the only woman in the Los Angeles bureau. Over the course of her career she rose through the ranks and earned the title of special correspondent in 1992, a designation bestowed on only 18 reporters since the AP was founded in 1846.

In 2019 she endowed journalism scholarships at her alma mater Monmouth University for $1 million.

In 2005 the Society of Professional Journalists awarded her the "Fellow of the Society," the organization's highest honor awarded for contributions to the journalism profession.

In 1992 she received the University of Missouri's Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism.

On 25 February 2016 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Washington Press Club Foundation, which she received at their Congressional Dinner.

While in college she interned for a summer at the Perth Amboy Evening News. That summer when she was twenty, she covered the 1963 civil rights March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King give his "I Have a Dream" speech. Her report on the event was her first front-page byline.

In 2015 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women's Media Foundation.

Covered the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (1968) and the trial of his assassin Sirhan Sirhan (1969), the trials of cult leader Charles Manson (1969-1971), Daniel Ellsberg (1975), abolitionist Angela Davis, music mogul Phil Spector (2009), Patty Hearst, singer Michael Jackson, actor Robert Blake, serial killer Richard Ramirez, and brothers Lyle and Erik Menéndez who were tried and convicted of killing their parents. She also covered the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995. In 1975 she was sent to Guam, where she interviewed evacuees from Vietnam following the Fall of Saigon. In 1992 she reported on the Rodney King riots.