KR Bureau Earns its Rep the Old-Fashioned Way

By: Joe Strupp Knight Ridder's Washington bureau started raising its profile just months after Sept. 11, when Clark Hoyt's team was the first to report President Bush's plans to overthrow Saddam Hussein. "It was generally under the radar," says bureau chief John Walcott, who co-wrote a key story on Feb. 13, 2002 that essentially predicted the U.S. invasion more than a year before it happened.

Other scoops followed in 2002 that chronicled Bush's plans for war and refuted many of the justifications for an invasion, such as the alleged existence of WMD. It also revealed some officials' doubts about the need for military action.

When the invasion began in 2003, Knight Ridder assembled the largest group of embedded reporters (35) of any news organization, along with 17 unilateral reporters. They also created a Baghdad bureau that recently earned a top Overseas Press award and continues to break news.

"The same spirit that dominated the Iraq reporting has carried over into everything here," says Walcott, a nine-year bureau veteran and a former editor at U.S. News & World Report. "Reporting, not recording. Always pushing back." Since then, the bureau has been credited with pouring resources into big stories and issues ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the true costs of the Medicare prescription legislation.

"Their focus has become more concentrated on being a big, national bureau," Mark Silva, a Chicago Tribune White House correspondent, says of his competitors. "You get better reporting out of it."

Hoyt traces the boost in coverage partly to a conference call just days after Sept. 11, 2001 that included Knight Ridder CEO Tony Ridder, former vice president/news Jerry Ceppos, and top editors from several of the chain's major papers. "Jerry said we were going to cover this as a Knight Ridder story out of Washington," Hoyt recalls. "The papers were to offer up people who wanted to volunteer, but not send them [to cover the story] individually."

This approach, as expected, drew skepticism from a number of KR editors, including Robert McGruder, then executive editor of the Detroit Free Press. "Bob spoke up and asked what the resources would be," Hoyt recalls. "Tony said, 'Whatever it takes.' That was the mandate, and it has been."

That philosophy led not only to the bureau's expansive war coverage, but also the creation of an investigative team and new foreign bureaus in Iraq and Cairo. In addition, Hoyt struck a careful balance between the national staff and the dozen or so regional reporters for Knight Ridder.

When the bureau, for example, assembled its large embedding force for the Iraq War, it sought volunteers from every Knight Ridder newspaper. Among them were non-foreign correspondents Hannah Allam of the St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press and Tom Lasseter of the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader. Allam has gone on to head the Cairo and Iraq bureaus and Lasseter has contributed much-lauded reporting from Iraq for most of the past three years.

A similar approach occurred during Katrina coverage. The key, Hoyt stresses, is not trying to report every Washington story that the bigger competitors are covering. "We pick and choose," he says. "If it is a choice between a daily story that almost everyone will have and something new where we are going to break new ground, we will go that way."

Hoyt's tenure did not begin so smoothly. He had to follow highly respected Knight Ridder veteran Gary Blonston, who died in 1999. That change, in part, prompted a wave of defections from the newsroom the same year, forcing Hoyt to bring in eight new reporters in less than a year's time, including current standouts Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay.

Associated Press Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll notes Hoyt's decision in 1997 to centralize the foreign bureaus under control of the Washington bureau instead of individual Knight Ridder papers. "It was extraordinarily unpopular with the editors at those papers," she recalls. "He let them yell and holler, but he knew it was the right thing to do ? and I think Knight Ridder is demonstrably better off for him having done that."

Hoyt hollered a bit himself several months ago when The Washington Post and The New York Times followed stories his bureau had broken without crediting it. In an internal March 2 memo to Knight Ridder editors, which eventually ended up on Poynter's Romenesko Web site, Hoyt wrote that he had contacted ombudsmen at both papers to complain about the lack of credit. The memo read, in part, "Why do we harp on this? Because the reporters who do groundbreaking work deserve the credit."

Hoyt's demand for proper acknowledgement reflects the bureau's long-running challenge to receive the same notice as such better-known D.C. outlets as the Post or the local bureaus of the New York Times or the AP. Some staffers claim that to outsiders, the name "Knight Ridder" can still conjure mental images of actor David Hasselhoff in a talking sports car. They say the McClatchy name is even less known in D.C. circles, and will require them to work even harder at solidifying their image after the merger is completed.

Some also blame the bureau's lesser-known name for its failure to win a Pulitzer Prize ? something Hoyt also laments, but to which he gives little credence: "I would love for reporters in this bureau to win a Pulitzer or Pulitzers. But that isn't why we do what we do. What matters is that stories have impact and get recognition from leaders, which I know we do."