Press Releases

03/08/2008

Steven R. Hurst appointed international political writer in Washington

NEW YORK (AP) -- Steven R. Hurst, who has served as Associated Press chief of bureau in Baghdad for the past 18 months, has been assigned to Washington to cover U.S. politics with an international perspective and oversee AP's election news delivered outside the United States.

The appointment, a new position, was announced Saturday by International Editor John Daniszewski.

"The U.S. election is, by far, the most significant story out of America this year for AP's many international subscribers, and Steve, who is at home in print as he is in television, will bring the essential perspective and skills needed to tell it in a compelling way," Daniszewski said.

"Steve has provided insightful, skilled and far-reaching coverage in Baghdad under grueling circumstances. His experience there will help inform AP's coverage of many of the election's central issues, including the war, foreign policy and national security," Daniszewski said.
A career foreign and diplomatic correspondent who has covered war, politics and social change globally, Hurst will report to North America Washington editor Ken Guggenheim, who oversees reporting from the capital edited and written for AP subscribers and clients outside of the United States.

Prior to his appointment as chief of bureau in Iraq in September 2006, Hurst, 60, rotated in and out of Baghdad as a chief editor for three years and also wrote from Cairo, Egypt, where he was briefly based.

Hurst joined the AP in 1976 as a correspondent in Columbus, Ohio, from the Decatur (Illinois) 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 is a graduate of Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., and holds a master's in journalism from the University of Missouri.