McClatchy’s Washington Bureau is home to an award-winning staff of 50 journalists who are committed to top-flight public service reporting about Washington and the world. Our aim is to provide readers with the information they need to hold their leaders accountable and to make informed decisions, not only about public issues but also about their own lives and families.

A team of nearly 30 reporters covers important developments in the nation's capital, assessing both their national significance and their hometown relevance for McClatchy's 30 newspapers and Internet sites. McClatchy also has full-time correspondents in nine cities around the world: Beijing, Berlin, Moscow, Baghdad, Cairo, Jerusalem, Nairobi, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City.

An editing staff of 11, led by Washington Editor David Westphal and Bureau Chief John Walcott, manages this team.

Our Washington and foreign-based reporters don't cover every story that moves. Rather, they concentrate on news developments that we believe are of special importance, those in which we have particular expertise and those that otherwise would go unreported.

These markers, in recent times, have led us to raise critical questions about the decision to go to war in Iraq; to examine the quality of health care for military veterans; to report vigorously on developments in Iraq and other trouble spots; and to uncover important new information about the Justice Department's firing of U.S. attorneys and its handling of alleged voter fraud cases.

We are proud of our record on these and other stories. For another view of our track record, check out this PBS special by Bill Moyers, which highlights the bureau's work questioning the rationale for the Iraq war.

Although our offices are just a few blocks from the White House, we aim to cover Washington from an outside-the-Beltway perspective. Relying in part on McClatchy's 30 newspapers, which extend from Miami to Anchorage, we report not just about the people who make the decisions in Washington. We also focus on the citizens across the country who live with the decisions. In the case of the war in Iraq, that means seeing the war through the eyes of the men and women who are sent to fight, as well as those of the policymakers in Washington who send them.

The McClatchy Washington Bureau is a product of the 2006 purchase of Knight Ridder by the McClatchy Co. The two companies' Washington operations were merged in June 2006; the result was an expanded operation that combines the national and international reporting traditions of Knight Ridder and the hometown reporting traditions of McClatchy.

The bureau is strengthened by its association with the McClatchy-Tribune newswire, which serves more than 400 newspapers around the world.

We invite your comments about our Website and our stories. To comment, or suggest a story, e-mail us at web@mcclatchydc.com. You can reach our news desk at 202-383-6001.

Here's our mailing address:
McClatchy Washington Bureau
700 12th St. NW, Suite 1000
Washington, DC 20005

-- David Westphal and John Walcott