Shen reported for The Baltimore Evening Sun in the late 1980s and then for 17 years was a staff writer for The Washington Post. An award-winning writer on The Post’s Metro staff, she covered Maryland state government and the General Assembly, local government, education, crime, environment and social issues. On the Style staff, she helped create and wrote for The Post’s “KidsPost” section, a daily page of news and features for young readers. Since leaving the paper she has been a fellow at the Knight Digital Media Center, at the University of California Berkeley, attending their March 2007 Multimedia Reporting and Convergence Workshop. She was proud to see The Brew mentioned in The New York Times as “a reason for cheer,” but moderately embarassed that Times media blogger David Carr also said sites like Brew show “how far journalists will go to avoid getting a real job.”
