John Walcott is Washington Bureau Chief for the McClatchy Co., the nation’s third-largest newspaper company. Based in Sacramento, Calif., McClatchy publishes 30 daily papers, including The Kansas City Star, The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee and the Charlotte Observer.

The McClatchy Washington Bureau has a staff of 45 editors and reporters in Washington and also oversees McClatchy's bureaus in Baghdad, Beijing, Cairo, Kabul and Mexico City.

Mr. Walcott was Washington Bureau Chief for Knight Ridder, Inc. until June, 2006, when McClatchy acquired Knight Ridder. Previously, he was foreign editor and national editor of U.S. News & World Report, national security correspondent at The Wall Street Journal and chief diplomatic correspondent at Newsweek magazine.

In 2008, he was named the inaugural winner of the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. He also has won the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, the Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and the Freedom of the Press Award from the National Press Club, the James K. Batten Prize for Journalism Excellence, Overseas Press Club awards.

The Knight Ridder and McClatchy Washington Bureaus under his leadership have won widespread acclaim for their early critical coverage of the Bush administration’s allegations about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to international terrorism, and for its coverage of the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the firings of eight U.S. attorneys and the Bush administration's detainee programs.

With CBS News Pentagon correspondent David C. Martin, Mr. Walcott is the co-author of Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of Americas War Against Terrorism, published in 1987 by Harper & Row.

In addition, Mr. Walcott served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense as senior counselor to the Federal Advisory Commission on Gender-Integrated Training and Related Military Issues and as the United States representative to the United Nations Roundtable on a New World Information and Communication Order. He also is a member of the Board of Advisers of SmartBrief, Inc., a Washington-based information services company.