“I don’t have anything good to say about either one of them,” Mr. Sussman, who died last June, told Ms. Shepard.
Reviewing her book in The Washington Post, Samuel G. Freedman wrote that it “efficiently synthesizes much of the existing coverage of Woodward and Bernstein, augmented by some energetic research of her own, but it told me very little I didn’t know before opening the cover.” Publishers Weekly, though, praised it for providing “an insightful, highly readable study for fans of journalism, U.S. politics and the work of ‘Woodstein.’”
After the book’s publication, Ms. Shepard was hired as an adjunct professor of media ethics at Georgetown University; her three years there overlapped with her time at NPR. She later taught journalism at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and media ethics at the University of Arkansas.
For several months in 2014, she served as digital editor of a start-up news website in Kabul, Afghanistan, where she trained young journalists. After that, she spent a year as a senior press liaison at the United States Agency for International Development, also in Kabul.
At her death, she had nearly finished a memoir about her diagnosis of lung cancer and the recovery of her husband, Mr. Marsden, from brain cancer. The book, tentatively called “The Luckiest Unlucky Couple,” is expected to be published soon.
In addition to her husband and her son, Cutter Hodierne, a filmmaker, Ms. Shepard is survived by two stepsons, Ted and Billy Marsden; a grandson; a brother, J. Powers Shepard; and a half sister, Emily Riddel.
In her final column as NPR’s ombudsman, in 2011, Ms. Shepard described the loneliness of the job. “The public,” she wrote, “thinks you are a shill for NPR, and NPR employees think you are an internal investigations unit.”
A typical conversation with an employee, she said, went this way:
“Me: ‘How are you?’
“Staffer (Long pause). ‘I don’t know. It depends on why you are calling.’”
Richard Sandomir
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