PETER COPELAND AGE: 40 JOINED SCRIPPS: 1982 as reporter in El Paso FAMILY: Married Maru in 1987; two children: Isabella, 5; Lucas, 2

New Managing Editor
For 'New' News Service

By JOHN LANG
Scripps Howard News Service

Peter Copeland has slept on sand, eaten cold food for a week, gone without showers for days, ridden into a minefield and watched men die.

This is what's called job preparation for a managing editor of Scripps Howard News Service.

The new ME also is fluent in Spanish ­ and his boss and almost all of his staff are not. That distinction helps preserve amicable relations, following tense moments in a place where if everything is quiet and peaceful then somebody better get busy.

Actually, whatever frustrations he may mutter in Spanish, in English his is the calming voice in the Washington bureau of SHNS.

Cool Hand Cope is the guy with hands-on responsibility for the 150-something stories the wire transmits in a day, for a staff of 48 (with 96 sharp elbows) and for arbitrating those professional differences of news judgment that burgeon from picking at nits into homicidal snits.

It's a job that can age you fast. Until last December, Copeland, now 40, was the bureau's assistant managing editor for news. He took the No. 2 post under Editor Dan Thomasson on the retirement of Marvin West. At the pace of news in 1998 ­ sex scandals swirling around the White House, a lunatic dictator in Iraq inviting a bombing, and Thomasson stomping about in the expectation that more Page One exclusives for Scripps Howard will fly out of the carpet ­ Copeland will be 65 himself by next December.

Of course that's all figurative, more or less. Anyway, Copeland was warned. His predecessor as AME/news, John Moore, who left for a stint as editor in San Luis Obispo, had told him: "Don't take this job, Peter, they could promote you."

Well, he's used to danger, misery, famine and being cussed.

	As Latin America correspondent and later Pentagon and Justice Department reporter, Copeland has covered breaking news all over the world.

He covered the U.S. invasion of Panama, the Gulf War and the intervention in Somalia. He has made numerous other reporting trips to Europe, Asia and Africa, to places and situations where if they'd been very nice there wouldn't have been any reason to go.

Copeland was the news service's Pentagon reporter and wrote on foreign affairs from 1989 through 1994 and then covered the Department of Justice. Before joining the Washington bureau, he spent five years as the Scripps Howard Latin America correspondent, traveling extensively in Mexico, Central and South America and the Caribbean.

He first came to Scripps in 1982 when he joined the staff of the El Paso (Texas) Herald-Post. He covered the U.S.-Mexico border and received first-place awards for investigative reporting from Texas UPI in 1982 and 1983. He was the Scripps Howard News Writer of the Year in 1984.

His career in journalism began in 1980, covering the night police beat for the City News Bureau of Chicago. A 1979 graduate in government from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wis., he also studied politics at Exeter University in England.

Some of his career highlights:

He was featured in and helped write a documentary for the PBS Frontline series called "Standoff in Mexico" about vote fraud during the 1985 Mexican elections.

His four books include the story of a Gulf War POW called "She Went to War: The Rhonda Cornum Story." It was cited by the New York Times Book Review as one of the "notable books of 1992." He wrote a book for Random House about the recovery of a Hollywood actress after a paralyzing accident. With National Institutes of Health scientist Dean Hamer, Copeland wrote "The Science of Desire," also a notable book of the year, and the recently published "Living With Our Genes," about the genetics of personality.

Copeland is married to the beautiful Maru, who was a lead dancer with the Ballet Folklorico de Mexico when he spotted her at a movie theater in Mexico City.

Maru once told a snoopy colleague who kept topping up the wine glasses that she was not much impressed when Copeland introduced himself. However, persistence is always admirable in a reporter, and he walked her home and got her to reveal her phone number.

And Copeland is, as noted, fluent in Spanish, apparently more so than anyone imagined. He married Maru in 1987. They have two children, Isabella, 5, and Lucas, 2. Now Maru's own 15-member troupe has become the hottest Latin dance company in D.C.

Copeland was born Sept. 19, 1957. That makes him one of the youngest managing editors of Scripps Howard News Service ever. His staff does not consider this a problem.

Besides, we're fast fixing that. He'll be grizzled as Homer's goat by next Tuesday.

This is, moreover, a man who has witnessed death more than once.

During the Gulf War, Copeland was watching a line of fleeing Iraqi tanks get chewed up by a Multiple Launch Rocket System. As he wrote of it then: "The horizon was lined with a string of golden balls that sparkled as the fuel and ammo exploded." The soldiers were watching, eating candy and cheering the brightest explosions until their sergeant major reminded them, "Hey, don't forget people are dying out there."

Soon enough, Copeland, too, was nearly among the quick and the dead. He was riding in a Humvee when the driver turned into a minefield. Copeland looked down on the sand and saw, all around, dozens of unexploded "bomblets" that had been fired by American artillery ­ two on either side of the left front tire. The driver had to back out, staying exactly in his tracks.

What Copeland wrote at the time could be, on consideration, a metaphor for life as a managing editor: "I got out of my seat and sat in the middle of the Humvee above the axle, trying to put a little more metal between my bottom and the bomblets."