[2][3] In 1996, the Scripps Howard News Service began syndicating his political column across a dozen newspapers across the country.
[2] An August 1998 profile of Roddy in Pittsburgh City Paper described him as having a knack for "getting into places other reporters find unobtainable -- the USAir jet crash site, President Clinton's limousine, a hotel elevator with presidential candidate Gary Hart and an attractive young woman.
Readers -- whether they notice his name on top of stories or not -- gain their impression of what's going on around Pittsburgh, what's amusing and what's tragic about it, from Roddy.
[3] In 1994, his award-winning article The Messenger Boys provided a first-hand account of an Irish Republican Army bomb attack in Belfast that killed 10.
[7] His work has been cited in A Force Upon the Plain by Kenneth S. Stern,[8] The Hunting of the President by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons,[9] and Blood and Politics by Leonard Zeskind.