AJR  The Beat
From AJR,   October 2001

Bennett Goes Bluegrass   

The Lexington Herald-Leader gets its second female top editor, as Amanda Bennett, former managing editor/enterprise at Portland’s Oregonian, takes up where Pam Luecke left off.

By Kathryn S. Wenner
Kathryn S. Wenner, a former AJR associate editor, is a copy editor at the Washington Post.     


The Lexington Herald-Leader gets its second female top editor, as Amanda Bennett, former managing editor/enterprise at Portland's Oregonian, takes up where Pam Luecke left off. Bennett, 49, says she didn't want to leave the Oregonian after three years, but the Herald-Leader "just smoked me out." Her most notable success in Portland was leading a team that won the paper this year's Pulitzer Prize for public service for its reporting on abuses by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. A Wall Street Journal reporter and bureau chief for 23 years, Bennett says the Kentucky paper's long tradition of investigative reporting is part of what lured her. "I want to take that and build on it and...help them more fully realize that investigative reporting is an attitude," she says. Bennett also wants to make the Herald-Leader "a place where the best young journalists will come to get the best training in the world."

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