College journalist scooped national media
Kurt D. Volker has traveled halfway around the world as a U.S. diplomat. He has met with world leaders, negotiated foreign policy and served under multiple American presidents.
But when he abruptly resigned from his job as the State Department’s special envoy for Ukraine, it wasn’t an international broadcaster or national newspaper that had the scoop.
It was a 20-year-old junior at Arizona State University who broke the news in the school’s student newspaper.
Volker serves as executive director of the Mccain Institute, a think tank in Washington that is run by Arizona State University. When reporters at the student newspaper, The State Press, discovered the connection, they began looking into Volker and, on Friday evening, confirmed with an unnamed school official that the ambassador had resigned.
Andrew Howard, a managing editor of The State Press, said he hadn’t set out to write a story that would be followed by reporters from dozens of major media outlets, including The New York Times. He had just been doing his job: covering the university.
“I didn’t take a different approach to this story than any other,” Howard said shortly after waking up to a flood of congratulatory texts on Saturday morning. “Everyone’s looking for an ‘a-ha’ moment that I don’t think was there.”
Volker resigned after news reports surfaced that President Donald Trump had encouraged Ukraine’s president to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic candidate for president, which touched off a House impeachment inquiry. According to a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s efforts, Volker had advised Ukrainian officials on how to “navigate” the president’s demands.
“We decided to take an approach to the story that a national outlet might not, and reach out to the university,” Howard said. “I’m not sure we ever expected to get the scoop that we did.”
When his story went online just after 6:15 p.m., Howard happened to be sitting in another newsroom: that of The Arizona Republic, where he is an intern and was working on obituaries. He apologized to his editors there for working two jobs at once.