Clark Hoyt
Clark Hoyt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose career spans more than half a century. After graduating from Columbia College in New York with a degree in English, he served as a speech writer and researcher for a U.S. Senator on Capitol Hill before finding his true calling, starting as a reporter for The Lakeland Ledger in Lakeland, Florida.
His first assignment was a Ku Klux Klan target shooting contest in a remote country field, with first prize a live turkey for Thanksgiving. He was so nervous he double exposed nearly all the film in the camera he’d been given to take photos to accompany the story. Hoyt covered police, courts, city commission and school board meetings — the basic local journalism necessary to keep communities informed and engaged.
In 1968, he joined the Detroit Free Press, beginning a 38-year career with Knight Newspapers, later Knight-Ridder, then the nation’s second largest newspaper company. He covered the state legislature and Michigan politics before moving to the nation’s capital in 1971 as Washington Correspondent for The Miami Herald, another Knight paper. He covered the Watergate hearings and criminal trial, the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the swearing in of President Gerald Ford.
In 1973, Hoyt shared the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with the late Robert S. Boyd for their work uncovering 1972 Democratic vice presidential nominee Tom Eagleton’s secret history of debilitating mental illness.
Hoyt began his editing career, first as News Editor of the Washington Bureau, later as Business Editor of the Free Press, Managing Editor of the Wichita Eagle-Beacon in Kansas and finally as Knight Ridder Washington Bureau Chief.
In 1993, he was promoted to Vice President/News, the company’s chief news officer, a role he held for six years before returning from corporate headquarters in San Jose, California, to Washington, where his wife was working at USA Today. He became Washington Editor, with responsibility for the Washington Bureau and the news operations of KRT, a supplemental news service in partnership with The Tribune Company.
After Knight Ridder was sold and broken up in 2006, Hoyt was named Public Editor, or news ombudsman, of the New York Times, writing a weekly column dealing with reader complaints and various journalism issues. When his three-year term as Public Editor expired, he joined Bloomberg News, serving in a variety of editing positions, including news ombudsman.
He retired in 2015 but kept his hand in by editing investigative projects for InsideClimate News, a non-profit covering all aspects of climate change.
Hoyt is a former president of the National Press Foundation, former officer of the National Press Club, a former member of the board of Virginia Humanities and current member of the board of InsideClimate News.
He and his wife, Linda Kauss, one of the founding editors of USA Today, live in Great Falls, Virginia.