For Westphal, who had run McClatchy's Washington bureau since 1998, that meant an eightfold increase in his staff. He oversees the combined bureau, now one of the larger ones in Washington. Located in the former Knight Ridder offices downtown, it has 120 employees, most of whom used to work for Knight Ridder. A relative handful -- 14 -- made the four-block trek from the significantly smaller McClatchy bureau in the National Press Building. ...

... At a time of falling newspaper circulation and newsroom layoffs, Westphal's situation is rare. "If you're running a newspaper bureau in 2006, it is an unusual day when you find yourself with a dramatically increased number of people," says Butch Ward, a distinguished fellow at the Poynter Institute and a one-time managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, a former Knight Ridder paper. Westphal, he says, must decide how to use his larger pool of resources, and "the question he will wrestle with is, 'How much Knight Ridder culture do I embrace, and how much do I ask the people of Knight Ridder to simply adapt to our way of doing things?'"
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