Alicia C. Shepard

From October 2007 to June 2011, Shepard served as NPR's Ombudsman. Her duties included investigating and responding to queries from the public regarding editorial standards in NPR's news programming. She also wrote an online column on www.NPR.org, and presented her views on journalistic issues on-air on National Public Radio.

Shepard taught Media Ethics in the graduate program at Georgetown University from 2007 to 2010, and taught journalism at American University and University of Texas. She has written for The New York Times, Washingtonian magazine, Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The Newark Star Ledger and The Washington Post.

She is the author of Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate (2006), which chronicles the captivating story of the famed journalists during and after the seismic events surrounding Watergate in the early 1970s. She also co-authored Running Toward Danger: Stories Behind the Breaking News of 9/11 (2002), about how journalists covered the tragedy and the public roles they played as keepers of calm on that seminal day.

From 1993 to 2002, she was a principal contributor to the American Journalism Review on such topics as how journalism works, the newspaper industry, ethics and new media. Her work was recognized three times with the National Press Club's top media criticism prize. From 1987 to 1993, she and her family sailed through the South Pacific and then lived in Kagoshima, Japan, where she wrote and learned Japanese. From 1982 to 1987, she was a staff reporter with the San Jose Mercury News. She began her career as a reporter in Washington, D.C., for Scripps League Newspapers in 1978.

Shepard holds a B.A. with honors in English from George Washington University and an M.A. in Journalism from the University of Maryland. She serves on the boards of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Organization of News Ombudsmen and as a journalism awards judge for the grand prize for the Robert F. Kennedy, Center for Justice & Human Rights. She regularly speaks to students, diplomats and professional journalists both domestic and abroad.