By Daniel Schmidt

March 16, 2022

 

AUBURN, Ala. – One afternoon in 2003, a foreign correspondent with the Associated Press sat at an American military base in Iraq talking with one of his colleagues, a photojournalist sent to visually cover the U.S.-led invasion. Suddenly, a brigadier general approached the correspondent and asked, “Are you and your photographer available around 21:00 hours tonight?”

 

“Yeah, sure,” the correspondent said. “Where are we going?” “I don’t know, and I can’t tell you,” the brigadier general replied. “That’s all I can say, and we didn’t have this conversation.” Hours later, they were hurtling above the dusty Iraqi landscape in helicopters packed full of armed soldiers prepared to conduct a high-stakes nighttime raid.

 

After landing at the target location, nothing happened, and the group was forced to return to base empty-handed. While Matt Moore did not realize it at the time, that mission was organized to capture deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and bring him to justice. In the end, it was simply a case of mistaken identity, and the story of a lifetime slipped between his fingers.

 

Today, Moore works from his home outside Philadelphia as a business editor for Bloomberg News. After a 30-plus-year career serving as a correspondent, bureau chief and editor for outlets across the United States and Europe, his current job has allowed him to settle down and return to the United States to be closer to family.

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His extensive vocabulary and effortless storytelling ability betray him as being an experienced journalist, and the thin mohawk that rises a few inches from his otherwise clean-shaven head screams punk rock. It is a combination of professionalism and flamboyant self-expression that typically would not work, but for Moore, it does. It is not hard to imagine him once wanting to write record reviews for Rolling Stone magazine.

 

Over the years, that combination served him well. After stints at smaller publications in Washington, D.C., Alabama and Florida, he landed his first job at a major outlet in 1999: the AP. He spent his first year and a half as an AP reporter in Jackson, Mississippi, as a business writer focused on telecommunications, agriculture and gambling development. Moore had always wanted to work with the AP because he figured it was the easiest way to get abroad, one of his major goals.

 

“I was very stoked and very excited. I felt like this is a big step, this is the real deal,” he said. “It was the culmination of a childhood dream.” Accompanying that excitement, however, was a sense of trepidation about whether he would fit in. After all, several of his new colleagues had decades of experience reporting at major publications.

 

After proving himself in Mississippi, he was offered a position at the home office in New York, which he accepted without hesitation. Once he arrived in New York, he immediately sought out the international editor, listed the languages he spoke and asked to be transferred abroad when the opportunity arose. That opportunity came after Moore spent several years cutting his teeth at the business desk learning the finer points of his craft.

 

His first foreign assignment was in Stockholm covering the Nordics and Baltics as well as overseeing business reporters at the Stockholm office. It was there that he and Karl Ritter helped break the news of the assassination of Swedish politician Ann Lindh on Sept. 10, 2003.

 

“He worked very fast and was very good under pressure,” said Ritter, a Europe-based news director for the AP who worked with Moore in Stockholm. “He furiously typed, even while talking on the phone or with others right there.

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Despite his professional demeanor, Moore was known around the office for having a sense of humor and being a prankster. Ritter recalled Moore asking someone if they needed a hand with something, and then tossing a miniature rubber hand at them. “It was at that moment I knew this guy was funny and he wasn’t going to be uptight or stiff,” Ritter said.

 

Following his tenure in Stockholm, Moore was transferred to Frankfurt, Germany, and became the European economics writer. While in Frankfurt, he bore a distant witness to the housing market crash of 2007, which initiated the Great Recession. “You felt detached from it all because you were not there, so I was watching it with this strange sense of awe and mystery, like someone in Munich or Bucharest would,” he said. “It was like, wow, are things ever going to be the same again back home?”

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After working two years as a European economics writer, he was promoted to bureau chief for Germany and Poland and was transferred to Berlin. The six years he was bureau chief in Berlin were his last in Europe, however, as obligations to his fast-growing children and family members back in the United States became more pressing.

           

Now, those days of warzones and breaking news coverage are distant memories. As a business editor for Bloomberg News, Moore’s responsibilities ensure he spends most days putting the finishing touches on stories before they are published as if he were a fine-tooth comb slicking back the hair of a swaggering Wall Street stockbroker.

           

As he works at his computer, picking apart each sentence, his son walks by and makes his way out the door to go to his job washing dishes at one of the local Mexican restaurants. Around the same time, his dogs, Pepper, a 15-year-old cockapoo; Kenny, a 14-year-old American terrier; and Nigel, a four-year-old valley bulldog, begin barking.

 

Throughout the years, Moore’s family has adopted older dogs from local shelters to give them a comfortable and loving home. At this point in his career, he pays them no mind; the newsrooms he has worked in across the world have conditioned him to tune out distractions.

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Moore was born on May 17, 1970, in Opelika, Alabama, to Mike, a career submariner in the U.S. Navy, and Carol Jane, a medical reporter turned public relations practitioner. A self-described military brat, Moore lived in 22 separate locations spanning three continents by the time he turned 18, including Germany and South Korea. While each of those locations has some significance to him, he considers Colorado Springs, Colorado, home since that was where he attended school for longer than a single year.

           

When it was time to apply to college, Moore had no shortage of options. Harvard, Purdue, Portland State, Puget Sound and Alabama were all on the table, but ultimately, he chose Auburn. His decision to spur the Crimson Tide in favor of the Tigers was welcomed news to his family.

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“We’ve had a member of the family at Auburn since the 1870s or 1880s,” Moore said. “I told my grandmother [I was accepted to Alabama], and she said, ‘Well that’s good, it's a fine school, but just remember that I’m an Auburn woman.’”

           

As soon as he arrived on campus for freshman orientation during the summer of 1988, Moore marched to Foy Hall and presented stories he had previously written to Paige Oliver, The Plainsman’s summer editor at the time. Oliver was impressed, and Moore started working at the student newspaper once he moved on campus that fall.

 

It would prove to be the start of a career that would validate the dreams of a boy who grew up reading Ernie Pyle’s Great Depression-era dispatches and idolizing Carl Kolchak from the 1970s television show ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker.’

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“Sometimes people ask me if that's accurate or not, and it's totally true that ‘Kolchak’ got me into reporting,” Moore said. “I was having a beer inside the Syrian border we had crossed illegally in 2004, and a colleague of mine from Agence France-Presse asked, ‘Why is it you wanted to do reporting?’” He said that he wanted to write about monsters.

           

Moore got his start writing professionally in Washington, D.C., where he spent roughly nine months working for a company that published weekly newsletters that covered Congressional legislation and regulatory changes for the medical community.

 

He traded the Beltway for Dothan, Alabama, "The Peanut Capital of the World," after being presented with an opportunity to join the Dothan Eagle. He started out writing for the lifestyle section, where his initial assignments included senior citizen profiles, such as the man who turned the shells of roadkill armadillos into fruit bowls and sold them for $50 to $100 apiece, conducting restaurant reviews and providing local entertainment coverage.

 

It was a world away from the fast-paced Congressional coverage in the nation’s capital, but he believed the experience at a “small-town paper” proved to be invaluable to his growth as a reporter. That growth eventually led him to become the only business reporter at the News-Herald in Panama City, Florida, for five years before earning his move to the AP.

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After an impressive career that took him across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Moore’s advice for aspiring correspondents is simple: “Do not be afraid to appear lost, and always carry a notebook and working pencil.”