CNN’s Soledad O’Brien is profiled by Newsweek. O’Brien, who author LLoyd Grove refers to as “Cable TV’s New Morning Thunder,” talks about her tough questioning of newsmakers.

If O’Brien’s shtick is appreciably more acerbic than conventional morning fare, her ex-boss, former CNN/U.S. president Jonathan Klein, praises “her tough questioning and lean-in demeanor, her ability to get people to open up to her, and her relentless drive to make everything as good as it possibly could be.” Klein left the once-dominant cable outlet in late 2010 amid chronically low ratings, and the management shake-ups continue to this day. But O’Brien, who dropped out of Harvard in the late ’80s for an entry-level job at Boston’s NBC station (she went back to Harvard a decade later and completed her degree), is keeping her head down and screening out the “noise.”