As a high school student, she worked at a gas station, a pancake house, a hamburger diner, a grocery store and a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet.

In 1977, LaFraniere earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in comparative literature, graduating magna cum laude and with honors from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island on a full academic scholarship.

In 1998, The Washington Post sent LaFraniere to Moscow as a foreign correspondent, an assignment that took her into conflict zones in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

She joined the newspaper's investigative unit in New York in late 2012, then moved to Washington D.C. to help cover President Donald Trump.

The second won the prize for breaking news from The Association for Business Journalists for their coverage of the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer-BioNTech.