While at Duke, she served as intern for Durham's ABC affiliate WTVD, covering the North Carolina state legislature and Senator Jesse Helm's first term in office.
[3] Tifft also earned a master's degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1982.
[4] After graduating from Duke, Tifft began working with Joel Fleishman, professor of law and public policy, to edit his book on campaign finance reform.
At Time, one of Tifft's first major assignments was to cover the 1984 presidential election, a task she found difficult to take on so early in her career.
[3] She received one of her early breaks in 1986, when she happened to be working late when word arrived that Ferdinand Marcos had fled the Philippines.
In 1999, the pair co-authored The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times, the first full-scale portrait of Adolph Ochs and his descendants.
[6][7] From 1998 to 2009, Tifft served as the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University.