Jerry Kammer, the former Copley Press reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing Randy “Duke” Cunningham’s bribery scandal, weighs in on the state of the Union-Tribune in a column for Notre Dame’s alumni magazine.
Woven into a lengthy piece about the state of the nation’s investigative journalism, Kammer offers a few insights about his former employer. He writes:
Two years ago, I had one of journalism’s peak experiences. At a ceremony on the campus of Columbia University, I stepped onto a platform with three colleagues to receive the Tiffany crystal trophy that embodies the Pulitzer Prize.
At the end of 2007, I slid into one of journalism’s biggest ditches. Sizing up the declining fortunes of my newspaper company, I accepted a buyout rather than expose myself to the inevitable coming layoffs. …
The diminishing resources of The San Diego Union-Tribune‘s Washington bureau make it unlikely that the bureau will be able to follow another story like the Cunningham scandal with anything like the rigor we brought to it in 2005.