My journalism career began as a reporter with The DeWitt County Observer, a weekly newspaper in Clinton, Illinois.  A collaboration between the small-town paper and the Chicago Daily News on allegations of abuse against a county sheriff drew the attention of Time Magazine and earned the two papers numerous awards, including the Peter Lisagor Award from the Chicago Headline Club and the Joseph P. McGuire Award from the ACLU.

I also worked as a reporter for The San Clemente (California) Sun-Post, where I covered a serial murder case, and the Midland (Michigan) Daily News, where I kept readers informed about county government.
My work has appeared in Orange County Illustrated, Orange Coast Magazine, Illinois Magazine and Illinois Times.​

From 2007 to June 2019, I covered crime and legal issues for The Pantagraph, a daily newspaper in Bloomington, Illinois. I previously worked as a correspondent for The Pantagraph covering courts and local government issues in central Illinois.
One of the most controversial cases, the capital murder case against Amanda Hamm and her boyfriend Maurice LaGrone, is the basis for a 2019 book I co-authored with veteran journalist Steve Vogel. The Unforgiven: the untold story of one woman’s search for love and justice, is an in-depth look at the drowning deaths of Hamm’s three children and the lingering questions about the jury verdicts in two separate trials.

From 2019 to 2024, I was a correspondent for WGLT, the NPR affiliate owned by Illinois State University. The ongoing issues that have plagued Illinois’ child welfare system in recent years is one of the topics I covered for the award-winning station. In 2020, Ryan Denham and I received the regional Edward R. Murrow Award for reporting for our story “Failing Rica,” on the death of 8-year-old Rica Rountree.
My work has been nationally recognized by Mental Health America for extensive coverage of mental health issues in the criminal justice system. I also received numerous awards from the Associated Press and Illinois Press Association, including the Abraham Lincoln Media Award for legal writing.

I am proud to be a journalism fellow at the Center on Crime, Media and Justice, John Jay College in New York.  My work with the Center includes projects on juvenile justice, mental health and re-entry issues for incarcerated individuals. My work has been published online in The Crime Report and distributed by The Associated Press.

In addition to my work as a journalist, I served as Media Coordinator for the Extended Media program for the Eleventh Judicial Circuit in central Illinois. The program allows reporters to photograph and record court proceedings according to rules approved by the Illinois Supreme Court.

In June 2018, I received top honors in Illinois and the Central Region of Daughters of the American Revolution for an essay on Women’s Issues. In 2019, I was the recipient of the DAR’s top honors for Illinois essayists.

Donation to the Vespasian Warner Library

Edith's early work with the DeWitt County Observer is chronicled in a bound volume of 1978 issues of the weekly newspaper she donated to the Vespasian Warner Library  on Sept. 3, 2019.  The newspaper issues will be a resource for genealogists and local historians for years to come. The volume was given to Edith by her close friend and talented journalist, the late Janeen Burkholder.