Former Times Leader intern and Kingston native part of award-winning Wall Street Journal team

WILKES-BARRE — At the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Friday, July 24, a team of investigative journalists from The Wall Street Journal won the Katharine Graham Award for Courage and Accountability.

The Award was presented to The Wall Street Journal team of Khadeeja Safdar, Joe Palazzolo, Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, Alex Leary, Rebecca Ballhaus and C. Ryan Barber — who is a native of Kingston.

According to the White House Correspondents’ Association website, the award recognizes an individual or news gathering team for coverage of subjects and events of significant national or regional importance in line with the human and professional qualities exemplified by the late Katharine Graham, the distinguished former publisher of the Washington Post. It comes with a prize of $10,000.

Barber, 36, is the son of Charles and Denny Barber, and he is a 2008 graduate of Wyoming Seminary, where his mom worked. His dad, Charles, was the original president/CEO of the Luzerne Foundation. Ryan graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012. Ryan has a younger brother, Greg, who now lives in the Chicago area.

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, hosted by CNN veteran Wolf Blitzer, was attended by President Donald Trump, members of his cabinet and staff, along with journalists who cover Washington, D.C., government, courts, the White House and more.

The Wall Street Journal team that Ryan Barber was a part of was honored for their bold investigative coverage of President Trump’s past relationship with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

In his presenting speech, Blitzer said the WSJ team’s reporting triggered the release of the “Epstein Files” — thousands of pages of documents that may have otherwise remained hidden. He said it prominently featured an unsettling, signed 2003 birthday letter from Trump to Epstein, which Trump denied writing.

As the WSJ team took the stage, Trump reacted by shrugging, smiling, and laughing before ultimately shaking hands with the reporters. He later went on a bitter tirade against The Wall Street Journal and the winning reporting team.

“We were aware of winning the award prior to the dinner,” Barber said. “That evening was surreal — very humbling. And I sort of felt deeply fortunate to have worked on an important story advancing the public’s right to know.”

Barber said he remains proud of the team’s effort and of winning the award.

Life in NEPA

Barber said his family moved to NEPA in 2000, just as he was beginning middle school and growing more engaged in current events.

“News coverage seemed to just course through our two-newspaper house in Kingston — with the Times Leader and Citizens’ Voice for breakfast, and dinner always coming after Peter Jennings on ABC,” Barber said. “While my dad loves newspapers — particularly the comics — my mom was the writer in the family and deserves credit as my first and most influential editor.”

By high school, Barber said his mother and some of his teachers seemed to think he had a natural talent for writing.

“Whether that’s so remains debatable,” he joked. “My mom’s encouragement helped make me aware of a program that turned me, as a sophomore in high school, from a regular reader of the Times Leader, into a writer for it — a page the newspaper opened to students for bi-weekly columns documenting the goings on at their schools.”

“While my mom passed on the storytelling gene, I also trace my journalism career back to my dad,” Barber said. “He devoted his career to the people of Luzerne County and always stressed the importance of giving back.

“In his day job, he led the Luzerne Foundation, but my image of his work giving back will always be of him dressed as Santa at senior home Christmas parties, with me following along as a volunteer ‘elf.’ With my news reporting, I’m always hoping to give back in my own way.”

Times Leader internship

In addition to his mom’s line-editing, Barber said she gave him a why-not attitude that led him, at age 16, to ask the Times Leader for a job on the sports desk.

“To my shock, they not only gave me a job as a clerk, but in a time of unpaid internships, actually gave me an hourly wage,” Barber said. “The $7 or $8 an hour was nice, but the real payoff from that period was getting to spend time with Times Leader legends like the late Jerry Kellar and Joe Soprano — big personalities who made the newsroom an intoxicating place.”

Barber said he learned by osmosis — just hearing Keller and Soprano on the phone — but everyone else in the TL newsroom also took him under their wing and, even with a deadline bearing down, always seemed to have time to patiently answer questions or share advice.

“Looking back, I don’t think I ever stood a chance of avoiding journalism,” Barber said. “But that time set a model for being a teammate and colleague that would’ve been transferable to anything I chose to do. Also, in journalism, one of the cardinal rules is to always correctly spell names. I joke to this day that there’s no better training for that than taking down the names and scores of NEPA’s bowlers. You’d hear from them if you screwed up!”

Barber said he attended Keller’s funeral in 2007, and he said he was saddened to learn of Soprano’s passing in 2025.

“Joe Soprano was a great journalist,” Barber said. “Even if I hadn’t stayed in journalism — the time I spent there was so educational and I learned how to be a good colleague and team player.”Barber said Soprano knew how to run a newsroom and handle a staff. He said he will always want to work in a newsroom, rather than remotely.

“We all feed off of each other,” he said. “And we benefit from being around each other every day. Joe Soprano showed me that there is a certain magic to a newsroom.”

His journalism journey

After graduating from Sem in 2008, Barber went to UNC-Chapel Hill, where he graduated four years later with a degree in political science and Peace, War and Defense (PWAD).

“But my true major in those four years was The Daily Tar Heel, where I arguably wasted my youth spending long days helping to put out a daily student newspaper that served as the paper of record not only for the campus, but the town of Chapel Hill,” Barber said. “I started at UNC thinking I’d major in journalism, but the experience working on the student newspaper amounted to such an immersive apprenticeship that it didn’t feel necessary to also study journalism in a classroom setting. It was a strange college experience, working late into the evening putting out a paper, only to then pull all-nighters writing papers for school, but I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.”

Barber said that left him with lifelong friendships, and he also landed internships he said he could only have dreamed of, with the Cape Cod Times in the summer after sophomore year and the St. Petersburg Times (now known as the Tampa Bay Times) after his junior year.

After college, Barber spent a year as a beat reporter for the Reading Eagle, where he covered crime and school boards. His mom had grown up just north of Reading, in Kutztown, and, given her influence on his journalism career, he said it felt almost poetic to get his full-time start where she had grown up.

“In 2013, the editors at the Cape Cod Times remembered me from my internship there years earlier and offered me a job covering a local state senator’s run for the Massachusetts governorship,” Barber said. “For the next two years, I had the best beat in Massachusetts, bouncing between the State House in Boston and the Cape covering everything from state budgets and campaigns to local courts.”

Barber said between his internship in the summer of 2010 and the two and a half years as a full-time reporter, the Cape Cod Times truly shaped him as a reporter, giving him experience with local news that is sadly growing harder to come by with the economics of the field.

“There’s no better training than having to write under your name and take accountability for your reporting from an early stage, and to see and shake hands with the people you cover rather than view them as abstractions,” Barber said. “The editors, reporters and photographers there were like the older siblings I never had.”

In 2015, Barber moved to Washington, D.C., to be with his girlfriend at the time and now-wife, Tarini Parti, who has worked at the Wall Street Journal since 2019. The couple met while attending University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They now have one child and are expecting another.

“It was daunting to drop into the competitive news environment that is DC, but at the National Law Journal, I found myself falling back on my local news experience and applying those fundamentals to Washington and its legal community,” Barber said. “With the help of an amazing editor and mentor in Mike Scarcella, I tried to approach the Justice Department, courts and legal industry the same way I’d covered past beats. In the past decade, some of the biggest stories have happened to fall within my beat, and it’s been rewarding and exhilarating to cover high-profile investigations and trials.”

At the Wall Street Journal, Barber’s beat covers legal affairs, the current Administration/White House, federal law enforcement, and all that goes with it.

Prior to joining the Wall Street Journal, Barber reported on the Justice Department and federal law enforcement for Insider and the National Law Journal.

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