Curl Switches Beats

Joseph Curl, senior White House correspondent for The Washington Times, is moving on from the beat he’s covered for nearly seven years. Word is that he is jumping over to cover the 2008 presidential campaigns full time for the paper, focusing on the GOP slate of candidates, effective immediately.

Curl, who writes some of the more colorful pool reports in the biz (he actually won a FishbowlDC contest on the subject), has covered President Bush since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2001.

Curl tells FishbowlDC that, as he ditches the White House charter’s first-class pod for the back seat of a campaign bus, he only has one regret: He traveled to 49 states with Bush…but not Vermont. “And now I’m trading Hanoi and Sydney for Des Moines and Manchester, but this is going to be a blast.”

Question: Is this a record for a print reporter covering the president for the same newspaper? David Jackson was there in 2001 but moved from the Dallas Morning News to USA Today. Ed Chen left the LA Times and is now with Bloomberg.

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