6.00 Pre-Assessment

Maureen Dowd has been a journalist for over 30 years. She started her career in 1974 as an editorial assistant for the Washington Star, where she later became a sports columnist, metropolitan reporter, and feature writer. When the newspaper closed in 1981, she went to work with Time. In 1983, she joined the New York Times originally as a metropolitan reporter. She began serving as a correspondent in Times Washington Bureau in 1986. I think Dowd is a very experienced journalist. She has been a journalist for over 30 years and has had many different positions and worked with many companies.

In 1995, Dowd became a New York Times columnist, and has been working in that position ever since. This job is different from her other jobs because her previous positions did not allow her to ever state her opinion; she always had to write impartially. However, being a columnist allows you to share your opinion with the community. The job is similar, however, because she is still working for a major newspaper. I think this writer was at the top of her career in the late 1990s and into the early 2000s. At that time she was winning many awards such as Woman of the Year in 1996 by Glamour magazine, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary, the Damon Runyon award for outstanding contributions to journalism in 2000 and became the first Mary Alice lectureship speaker at the University of Texas at Austin in 2005. As a columnist, it is Dowd's duty to provide the community with her opinions, whatever they may be, good or bad, negative or positive.