Scott Kraft

Los Angeles Times Senior Editor & Roving Correspondent
October 12, 2009 - 4:00pm
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About Scott Kraft

Scott Kraft, currently senior editor and roving correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, has covered or directed coverage of many of the world’s top stories during more than two decades as an editor and reporter.

As National Editor of the LA Times from 1997 until 2008, Kraft oversaw a 75-person news department with bureaus in 10 cities. He directed the paper’s coverage of many major stories, including 9/11, Columbine, the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 Florida recount and Hurricane Katrina. He ran the paper’s presidential campaign coverage in 2000, 2004 and 2008. Under Kraft, the National staff won four Pulitzer Prizes – two in Feature Writing, one for National Reporting and another for Investigative Reporting.

Kraft became an editor after a distinguished career as a national and foreign correspondent for The Times, with postings in Chicago and as bureau chief in Nairobi, Johannesburg and Paris. During a 6-year assignment in South Africa, he covered the release of Nelson Mandela, the country’s first democratic elections and the war in Angola. He also reported on the ill-fated American military mission in Somalia and the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Kraft has written more than 100 Column One stories, the LA Times’s signature front-page enterprise pieces, from more than two dozen countries. His report in the Los Angeles Times Magazine on the role of women in the AIDS epidemic in Zimbabwe won the national Sigma Delta Chi Award for Foreign Correspondence in 1992.

Before coming to The Times, Kraft worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press in Missouri, Kansas and New York. While an AP National Writer, based in New York, he wrote a 6,000-word narrative story on a California woman who tracked down the man who molested her daughter. That piece was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing in 1985.

Kraft has been a member of the visiting faculty at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and has been a featured speaker at three National Writers Workshops.