[3] While a globe-trotting correspondent for NBC News,[4] Laufer also reported, wrote, and produced several documentaries and special event broadcasts for the network that dealt with social issues, including the first nationwide live radio discussion of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

[5] Laufer's first major exposure to immigration issues dates to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, when he reported from Afghan refugee camps for NBC Radio.

Almost 10 years later, as the Iron Curtain began to rise at the Berlin Wall, which he reported for CBS Radio, Laufer covered immigration from Western Europe, and from Mexico to the United States.

Laufer has written Exodus to Berlin, a book version of his study of the resurgence of the Jewish population in Germany and the concurrent rise of right-wing violence, and Wetback Nation: The Case for Opening the Mexican-American Border.

[9] Another of their Washington Monthly projects is Calexico a series of radio documentaries celebrating the California-Mexico borderlands, and supported by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities.

His experiences with Mission Rejected resulted in a natural history trilogy: The Dangerous World of Butterflies,[11] Forbidden Creatures,[12] and No Animals Were Harmed During the Writing of this Book.

[citation needed] From there he joined KSFO in San Francisco as a news writer while the self-proclaimed "World's Greatest Radio Station" was at its zenith.

Those KYUU reporting duties included foreign correspondence covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the U.S.-Soviet proxy wars in Central America.

[17] That experience led to his assuming the role of founding Programmdirektor of Newstalk 93.6 in Berlin, Germany's first American-style, German-language talk radio station.

He consulted management and coached air staff at TalkRadio/talkSPORT in London, working with manager/owner Kelvin MacKenzie, the former editor of Rupert Murdoch's flagship British tabloid, the Sun.

His other newspaper duties included working as the media critic in the early 1990s for SF Weekly and acting as editor-in-chief in the early 1970s of the resurgent Gold Hill News, bringing the classic Nevada newspaper back to the Comstock after a 92-year hiatus, a lapse he apologized for in a "note to readers" on the paper's front page that was flashed across the country on the wires of the Associated Press.

Laufer has written on the post-Communist scene in Prague and about the fate of Soviet-bloc spies for the San Francisco Examiner's Sunday magazine Image, and his feature articles have been published in periodicals such as Europe, Mother Jones, Hungry Mind Review, Washington Journalism Review, Kansas City Star, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, San Francisco Chronicle, and Prague-based Pozor magazine.

For Penthouse magazine, Laufer's work included travel to Peru to interview Lori Berenson,[21] training for survival in conflict zones with former British Marines, and investigating the predatory scam of selling bogus university degrees.

For Internews Networks and as a charter fellow of the Knight International Press Fellowship, he was dispatched to make an assessment of the Minsk Mass Media Center in Belarus.