Knight Ridder Foreign Editor Jumps to Crane-Rogers Foundation

By: E&P Staff Steven Butler, foreign editor for Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, will become executive director of the Crane-Rogers Foundation's Institute of Current World Affairs beginning in June, the New Hampshire-based Foundation announced today.

"The Institute has been a love of Steve's life for a quarter of a century," said the outgoing director, Peter Bird Martin, in a statement, "so despite appearances and rumors, Steve is not jumping ship." Earlier this week Knight Ridder agreed to sell its 32 newspapers to McClatchy. This will result in a merged Washington bureau led by a McClatchy editor.

"I feel deeply grateful to the Institute for the wonderful opportunity provided to me almost 25 years ago at a turning point in my life," Butler said in a statement. "It's an exciting prospect that I'll be able to provide that kind of opportunity to other young people early in their careers." The foundation will be moving to Washington, D.C.

For the past 81 years, the Institute has been seeking out promising young internationalists and providing them with long-term fellowships outside the United States. "Steve was a professor of Chinese studies at Cornell in 1981 when he applied for a fellowship," said Martin.

Butler won the fellowship, and he went off to learn Korean, study, and write for nearly three years. From 1993 to 2000 he was Tokyo bureau chief for U.S. News & World Report, then moved to Washington as the magazine's chief economics correspondent. In 2001 he was appointed foreign editor at Knight Ridder.

In a memo to staffers, Knight Ridder Washington Editor Clark Hoyt called Butler "a talented editor, a witty colleague, a solid friend.

"Steve has for several years had the incredibly challenging job of managing our coverage from the Middle East. That means talking through and editing the great stories of Hannah Allam, Nancy Youssef, Tom Lasseter, Dion Nissenbaum and many others rotating through. It also means seeing to their safety and emotional well being night and day, weekdays and weekends. He's done the job with great skill and so smoothly that many around him may not know just how intense and demanding it is to handle people who are constantly in harm's way. Steve's level head, calm demeanor and great compassion have served us all well."