Prickly, difficult, sceptical, curious, tenacious - and paid for it

Where else can you get paid and praised for being prickly, difficult, sceptical, curious and tenacious?

Erik Kirschbaum is going to miss Reuters. After 25 years, he signed off on Friday to begin a year-long sabbatical. His project is a book on Juergen Klinsmann, the US soccer coach whom he got to know at press conferences when Klinsmann coached Germany from 2004-06. Kirschbaum, right in the photo, is shown with Klinsmann.

Kirschbaum - who has been based for Reuters in Frankfurt, Bonn, Vienna and Berlin - joined the agency in West Germany, three days before reunification and has made a living asking uncomfortable questions to everyone from German chancellors from Helmut Kohl onwards to pop star Robbie Williams.

He once annoyed Kohl, embroiled in a campaign finance scandal at the time, by asking at a televised news conference: "Why do you keep blaming the media? It’s starting to sound like Richard Nixon?". And he inadvertently helped Gerhard Schroeder clear the air about media reports of an extra-marital affair with a TV journalist by asking, "What do you think of the TV, radio and newspaper reports circulating about your alleged family troubles?" Schroeder replied by first asking Kirschbaum "How is your marriage?" and then cutting off his answer ("fine, but that wasn't the question") by saying: "Journalists have the right to report, to write and to ask anything they want - but any journalists who spreads untruths will face the full legal consequences”.

And Kirschbaum asked Robbie Williams in Berlin if he really didn't care that he wasn't as popular in the United States as he was elsewhere in the world, referring to a comment he had made a year earlier that hit his record company's share price. Williams replied with a series of four-letter words to "Mr Reuters".

Kirschbaum, 54, started working as a copy boy at a small daily newspaper in Danbury, Connecticut at the age of 16. He was fascinated by the AP and UPI news agency stories and all their exotic world datelines that came through the old teletype machines at a speed of about 100 words per minute - and decided then he wanted to be a foreign correspondent. His job was to wind up and sort the yellow teletype tapes accompanying each story and pile the hard-copy agency reports spewing out of the machines on to the copy desk. At 17 he started working as a sportswriter there. He later worked for newspapers in Connecticut, Wisconsin, California and Nevada before joining AP-Dow Jones in New York in 1988 and moving to Frankfurt in early 1989. Twenty months later he joined Reuters, where he spent the next 25 years.

Kirschbaum admires Klinsmann and others “who aren't afraid challenge the status quo even if they get a lot of grief for it”.

Of Reuters, he added: “It is truly a great place to work. There are creative people in every corner of the world at Reuters and where else can you get paid and praised for being prickly, difficult, skeptical, curious and tenacious?” ■