The story behind the scoop

Since Monday afternoon, more friends than I thought I had and more professors than I’ve known over four years have asked me how The Hatchet was able to break the Steven Knapp story (online at 5:15 p.m.) a day before the University’s official announcement — scooping The Washington Post, Associated Press, among other media outlets which covered Trachtenberg’s successor.

Well, bad news first: As secretive as the presidential search process was (see “Mum’s the word on selection”), the mechanics of the reporting behind the scenes is just as confidential. With the exception of Trachtenberg, who I’ll get to shortly, any other people who may have helped us along the way would probably rather be kept out of this. Though, I can say that at no point during the search process did anyone ever tell us that Steven Knapp was the top choice or that he was under consideration by the Board of Trustees. That would’ve been too easy. We just had a series of little bits and pieces of chatter that led us eventually — after intensive research and phone calls — to the literary-scholar-turned-president.

Knapp was a hunch, and I ran with it. I somehow got him on the phone Monday afternoon and — unlike other university administrators at other schools who we contacted — he didn’t say he had no idea what we were talking about. Fellow senior news editor Brandon Butler spoke with a gentleman at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; he said he was flattered we thought of him but wasn’t up for our school’s job opening. Knapp, on the other hand, told me that he didn’t feel comfortable answering my questions about being Trachtenberg’s successor:

“It would not be appropriate for me to comment on something because it’s their business … I need to get the right from them to comment on that,” he said over the phone mid-afternoon Monday. That didn’t sound like a denial to me. It had to be him! But I still needed confirmation.

Hatchet colleagues and I spoke to various senior and junior administrators as well as receptionists and assistants at Johns Hopkins after I “knew” that Knapp was the guy. Practically everyone called was aware of something about Knapp’s career advancement in Foggy Bottom. In two instances, Brandon prefaced a phone call by saying that we’re working on a story about a senior official at Johns Hopkins coming to GW. And two people immediately retorted, “oh, you mean Steven Knapp?” When asked to confirm that he announced he’ll be coming here as president, they both said no.

So now I knew 99.9% that it was Knapp, but no one would confirm it. The only way the outgoing provost at Johns Hopkins would speak to me on the record is if GW Communications Department gave him permission. After hanging up with him, I called — and relentlessly so — almost every P.R. official at GW, but no one with the authority to do anything answered. By then they may have gotten wind that we had been calling around Johns Hopkins, or maybe they were just legitimately busy. So around 4 p.m. or so, I got fed up and walked to Rice Hall to confront someone from Media Relations with the fact that I knew Knapp was the pick and that I wanted to speak with him. Well, on the way up to their floor I bumped into President Trachtenberg in the lobby, asked to accompany him to his office and the rest is history, as they say.

The moral of the story, perhaps, is that if The Hatchet calls, you best pick up your phone.