Sam Kennedy has been a business reporter at The Morning Call of Allentown since 2003. Previously, he worked at The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa and completed an internship at the Los Angeles Times. In 2001, he graduated from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Before entering journalism, he worked in the software industry in the San Francisco Bay Area and served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Mali, West Africa, where he met his wife. His undergraduate degree is from The University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he graduated in 1994 with a double major in finance and journalism. Last year, he was a finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, for an article about substandard regional public transportation. The year before that, he won an award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, for an expose on the local cable industry’s efforts to thwart competition. He was also co-captain of his high school soccer team, though he was widely regarded by competitors as slow and easy to fake-out, and his team just barely managed to finish the season with a winning record.