Stars and Stripes is taking on a new role in reporting on the Pentagon. Forbes:

Forbes: Stars and Stripes took a lot of people by surprise last month when it published a report documenting the Pentagon’s use of a Washington PR firm, the Rendon Group, which grades reporters and evaluates their degrees of positive military coverage. Does this signal a new direction for the paper?
Witt: For many years, this has been a pretty tame newspaper and, frankly, pretty boring. There is a tradition here of people pulling their punches when it comes to covering the Pentagon. My boss, Terry Leonard, a veteran AP reporter, got a mandate to make this a more aggressive, serious newspaper. That’s my mission. The best way to do that is to give men and women of America who are risking their lives overseas for us, all the news, good or bad, and not spare them from stories about problems in the military.
We deeply honor the audience that we’re serving. It’s a sacred mission because, in many cases, we’re their only source of news. But you don’t do that by feeding the troops pablum and feel-good stories. Reporters at Stars and Stripes are now blossoming and doing amazing stories they never did before. It’s all about making this newspaper aggressive. We won’t be ignored anymore.
Why didn’t The Washington Post get that story?
I don’t know. But if they get a story like that before us, we’re failing. I don’t expect that we’re going to suddenly become the place where all the leaks go involving military strategy in Afghanistan. But it’s a start.

The rest here.