Darby spent a year in Prague after being accepted in 2007 to the Hart Fellows Program, which gives recent Duke graduates the chance to conduct research with community partners around the world who are wrestling with complicated social, political and humanitarian issues. As part of her fellowship, Darby worked as an assistant editor and correspondent for Transitions Online (TOL), a publication that covers Eastern Europe, Russia, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her research focused on training programs for reporters in the region.

Darby remembers that for journalists she met in Eastern Europe, deadlines were often the least of their worries. In many of those countries, journalists who have long been stifled by government censorship are starting to bring their work to the masses with the advent of the internet, but some of the traditional threats persist.

"I really appreciate how in the U.S. you can write about just about anything you want and you can say lots of what you want," she said. "Journalists there didn't have a fraction of the options."

Darby has wanted to be a journalist for almost as long as she can remember, and she was naturally drawn to media as the focal point of her fellowship. She came to TOL with a great deal of experience under her belt, having served as the editor of The Chronicle and led the publication through the well-known Duke lacrosse case. On one of her first days on the job at TOL, she joked with her editor that she had copyedited the first stories of freshman engineers-she felt ready to take a hands-on role in shaping stories mentoring writers. But the job presented new challenges.

"Leaving college, it's a very quick mental shift to sort of insert yourself into the working world," she said. "The stakes are higher when you're editing pieces about human rights in Uzbekistan."

In the digital age, citizens of repressed nations are beginning to gain new opportunities to make their voices heard-governments cannot monitor blogs as easily as newspapers. But writers sometimes struggle when they sit down to pen a story themselves, having grown up without the example of a free and flourishing press, Darby said. In her role as an editor at TOL, Darby strove to give these writers the journalism education they had been denied so they could take full advantage of the new opportunities that awaited them.

"For these journalists this was a brave new world where they felt like they had new freedoms, and at the same time they were lacking in some journalism basics," she said. "My research was about tying those things together, finding a way to make new media journalists great investigators... not just people who can post a press release when it comes out."

Yet Darby discovered that even once her team of writers had mastered the basics and written compelling stories, the decision to publish-often a no-brainer for an American journalist-could be agonizing. Rather than savoring the glory of a byline, many TOL contributors went by pseudonyms, fearing that their work could have dangerous repercussions for themselves and their families. Darby worked extensively with one writer from Turkmenistan on an assignment, but the author had a change of heart.

"She said, ‘I just can't publish it, I feel like it would put me and my family in danger,'" Darby said.

Darby could not fault her. She experienced the tortured relations between the government and the press for herself when she called up a Kazakh official as part of the reporting process for one of her first pieces for TOL.

"I started out with a softball question, and I started asking tougher questions. He asked for my name, and I could hear him writing it down. It was delicate in the sense that I wanted to make sure to get the answers I needed."

Darby felt her leadership skills surge as she found a way to build a team of young writers while respecting the hierarchy of an established media organization. She continues to draw on the lessons in her role as an editor at The New Republic today.

"I do a lot of the same type of stuff here, corresponding with writers and editing writers. In the vast majority of cases they are American and have great English, but there are still just the dynamics of how you interact with people who are working incredibly hard for you," she said. "As a Hart Fellow, I learned how to act as a sympathetic leader."

Darby said her time as a Hart Fellow also gave her a deep appreciation of the importance of the press in a democratic society, which inspires her to shine the spotlight on education through her work. After editing a number of education pieces for TOL, she returned to the U.S. and was reminded of the inadequate and uneven state of our own education system. Though she is not in the classroom, she believes that the press can play an important role by explaining what needs to be done. She knows how much journalists can do, even in a society with full freedom.

"What the Hart Fellowship taught me a lot about was media on a macro scale, the role that a strong media can play in all phases of development. It still gives me perspective on the role that a magazine like this plays in society," she said.

Darby thoroughly enjoys her work at The New Republic, a publication in which she sees the same principled stance and willingness to engage other viewpoints that drew her to the Hart Leadership Program nearly four years ago. But she does hope to address the wider world with her work in the future, perhaps obtaining a graduate degree in international relations and then working for a human rights organization, magazine or newspaper to focus on the online coverage of foreign issues. Washington is exhilarating, but she still has Eastern Europe under her skin.

"I'm interested in the role of media not just in distributing information but in shaping democracy, so I think, while writing and editing will always be important to me, I'd also like to delve back into work that both tracks the role media plays in Eastern Europe and articulates how it can be developed," she said. "This sort of role could involve my living in the U.S. or abroad--which, thanks to Hart, I would be ready to do."