09/28/06

Steven R. Hurst appointed Associated Press bureau chief in Iraq

NEW YORK -- Steven R. Hurst, correspondent in Cairo for the Associated Press, has been appointed chief of bureau for Iraq.

The appointment was announced Thursday by International Editor John Daniszewski.

Hurst has been rotating in and out of Baghdad as a chief editor for the past three years.

"We are very pleased to have such a seasoned and talented writer and reporter, one who has worked in many difficult countries and who is equally at home in television and in print, take on one of the most important and challenging assignments in international reporting today," Daniszewski said.

"Hurst will lead one of the largest bureaus, if not the largest, of any news organization in Iraq, overseeing AP employees in print, photos and television around the country."

Hurst joined the AP in 1976 as a correspondent in Columbus, Ohio, from the Decatur (Ill.) Herald and Review. He served as a correspondent and bureau chief in Moscow for the news cooperative from 1979 to 1984, with a brief stint in Ankara, Turkey.

He left the AP in 1988 to work in broadcast journalism, covering Moscow for NBC and then CNN. During this time, he won numerous awards for his reporting on the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, the Soviet coup in 1991 and the Russian parliament uprising in 1993. He became the State Department correspondent for CNN in 1994.

In 2000, Hurst returned to the AP and was appointed assistant international editor in 2004. He has been in Cairo since 2005.

He is a graduate of Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., and holds a master's in journalism from the University of Missouri.

Contact: Jack Stokes, AP Corporate Communications, 212.621.1720