Small Oregon Paper Leads Reporting On Missing Local Soldier

By: Joe Strupp When editors at The Bulletin of Bend, Ore. found out Sunday afternoon that Thomas L. Tucker of nearby Madras, Ore., was one of two soldiers kidnapped in Iraq, they went into overdrive on the now-local story.

By deadline Sunday night, three of the paper's 13 reporters had been put on the story, which included comments from sources as varied as the G.I.'s former boss at a local convenience store to the mother of a one-time childhood baseball teammate. The biggest coup, however, was getting his high school yearbook picture, which has since been distributed by the Associated Press and will likely be in hundreds of newspapers on Tuesday.

"Our reporter there knows a lot of people and called up a school administrator Sunday night," Editor-in-chief John Costa said about how the photo was obtained. "They got the yearbook photo. Then that led to someone else who knew him and someone else and someone else. This is the benefit we get of having a local staff."

Costa said other news outlets had been seeking the photo, which went out on the AP wire at about 1:30 p.m. EST. "Lots of people want it, but we are not distributing it yet," he said.

Costa said the missing soldier, whose whereabouts remained unknown Monday afternoon, was the biggest local story related to the war since the invasion occurred in 2003. He said the paper had covered events about the Oregon National Guard being deployed in Iraq. But for a specific local story, this is the newsiest.

"We have not had a lot of direct Iraq War efforts here other than the national guard," Costa said about Tucker, who is reportedly being held by a group with ties to al-Qaeda. "This would be the most devastating loss, direct personal loss of a native son since the war began."

Costa said the same handful of staffers were on the story again today. But he had not determined how much space would be devoted to the update in Tuesday's paper. The story was the lead in Monday's edition, with about 20% of Page One devoted to it, as well as about one-third of an inside page.

The paper's Web site also has seen one of its most active days since launching in 2001, according to Web Editor Curtis Fulton. He acknowledged that the site was being slowed by the traffic increase, but had no specific numbers to report. "We've been getting hammered," he said about the traffic, which averages some 1 million hits per month. "It has slowed down and it is very sluggish."

The high traffic may be connected to the fact that the story has been linked to CNN's Web site, which has made the Bulletin story part of its related links.

Fulton said the Bulletin site had been upgraded just last October to post every story that appears in print. Prior to that, it had only offered a sampling of the printed paper's stories.

Costa said the paper has been limited in its official reporting on the missing soldiers because both Tucker's family and the Pentagon have been slow about releasing information. "Those are two tremendous handicaps," he said. "But it is clear that it is the story of the day."