Deborah Barfield Berry

Deborah Barfield Berry, a 2023 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and Pulitzer Prize winner, is a former national correspondent for USA TODAY, where she focused on voting rights, civil rights and politics. She became director of Merrill College's Capital News Service Annapolis bureau in January 2026.

She leads Merrill College students in their daily coverage of the Maryland State House and issues important to Marylanders.

Berry, an award-winning journalist, has spent most of her journalism career in Washington, D.C., where she has covered Congress and national politics. She serves as president of the board for the Washington Press Club Foundation.

Her journalism career includes reporting for Gannett News Service, Newsday, Knight Ridder News Service, The Providence Journal, the Times Herald-Record and The Star Democrat.

Berry was part of a Newsday team that won a 1997 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800. She recently won a 2025 National Association of Black Journalists Salute to Excellence Award and won other NABJ awards over the years. She was also part of a team that won several awards for the USA TODAY project, "1619: Searching for Answers," and was the lead reporter and creator of "Seven Days of 1961," an award-winning multimedia civil rights project. 

She was a lecturer at The George Washington University’s School of Media & Public Affairs, where she taught a news writing and reporting course, and a writing coach at Merrill College. She is a volunteer with the Washington Association of Black Journalists urban high school journalism workshop.

The native of Brooklyn, New York, is a graduate of Merrill College, where in 2023 she was inducted into the Merrill College Hall of Fame.

Degree
B.S., University of Maryland