With a broad range of responsibilities and a swirl of activity sending SHNS staffers in a multitude of directions, lunchtime get-togethers are important for sharing notes and honing direction.

It's All About Service

During the more than 80 years since E.W. Scripps first established a bureau in Washington, D.C., Scripps Howard News Service has never forgotten its roots.

From a staff of nine reporters working exclusively for Scripps papers, the bureau has become one of the country's leading supplemental wires, moving 150 stories daily to more than 400 newspapers. The newest innovations ­ a photo service, fully paginated Feature Fronts, and an Internet delivery system ­ lead the industry in technology and quality.

In 1995, SHNS took over the wire operations of the McClatchy newspaper group and established the Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, providing coverage of the West for newspapers from Denver to California.

SHNS Editor Dan Thomasson also saw the need to make SHNS useful to the expanding television operations of Scripps. He built a system that allows the local Scripps TV stations to carry live reports from Washington, and he expanded the reach of Home & Garden Television by turning the cable network's TV stars into newspaper columnists.

More than 60 newspapers are taking ready-for-press home and garden pages designed by Hank and Martha Wilson. Feature Fronts on health and fitness are being tested, and they will be followed by paginated section fronts on food, travel and other topics requested by Scripps editors.

The new products and services are designed to produce new revenue, to save money at our newspapers and to make the highest quality journalism available to newspapers of all sizes.

Even as the bureau expanded in all these new directions, the focus has remained on our original mission: to help our papers do their jobs better. As AME/Sports Editor Tom O'Toole says, "We can never forget that the last word in Scripps Howard News Service is 'service.'"

O'Toole has built a hub linking sports departments around the country, allowing them to share stories and resources for major events such as the Olympics. O'Toole and three reporters not only write award-winning stories about sports, but they edit copy and help our papers plan their coverage.

Jeff Keeton swaps news graphics and photos among the papers, as well as shooting original art. When the Rocky Mountain News produced excellent photos and graphics from the Timothy McVeigh trial, the art was available to our papers even before it appeared in the Rocky.

Cartoonist Henry Payne makes some of the best Scripps cartoonists available to our papers, while helping the three Florida papers share daily editorials on statewide issues. AME/Features Walter Veazey coordinates the efforts of Scripps papers to produce 10 special sections a year, including a bridal package and gift guide.

Some of our most appreciated efforts are managed by Tom Hargrove, one of the nation's leading pollsters and experts in computer-assisted reporting. Hargrove, working with the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, not only produces national polls, but delivers a customized local version based on the data for each paper's circulation area.

As coordinators for "Dream Team" projects, in which our papers team up to tackle important issues such as the cost of higher education, SHNS developed the strategy of "think nationally, write locally." Reports from Scripps papers are used to write a national overview, which then is localized by the contributing papers.

This strategy is used every day by the bureau. For example, when checking out a tip from Scripps President and CEO Bill Burleigh that heroin was making a comeback, John Lang discovered a pattern of heroin overdoses in Plano, Texas, which had been well covered by Scripps' scrappy new paper there.

The backbone of localized coverage, of course, comes from the nine Washington correspondents of our newspapers. Their mission is to report the news of interest to people in their communities, focusing on not just what's happening here but what it means to people back home.

Veteran Washington hands like Thomasson, who came to SHNS from the Rocky Mountain News in 1964, have never forgotten that the most important readers live far from the Beltway in Naples, Fla., and Corpus Christi, Texas, and other Scripps cities.

"This is why we decided that in 1998 our news editor, the person with minute-by-minute responsibility for what goes out on the wire, should be someone steeped in the Scripps tradition," explains Thomasson.

"After interviews at several of our papers, we chose Mark Tomasik, who has been an editor at our papers in Hollywood, Fla., Evansville, Ind., and Cincinnati."

SHNS is making a renewed effort to reach out to Scripps papers. Says Thomasson, "Please tell us what kind of stories you need and how we can serve you better. You can reach us by phone, mail or the Internet at www.shns.com."