Englund and his wife, Kathy Lally, worked for the Glasgow Herald as part of a Fulbright scholarship to the United Kingdom in 1988.
[7][8][2] in 1993, during their first overseas tour, Englund found himself summoned and questioned by a Russian investigator, Viktor Shkarin.
He, and multiple news organizations, including his employer, The Baltimore Sun maintained that the incident was the result of a series of stories that he had written about Russia's chemical weapons program.
The incident was the first time an American reporter was summoned for questioning since 1986, when Nicholas Daniloff, was questioned and arrested on espionage charges, before being released in exchange for the release of Gennadi Zakharov, who was detained in the U.S.[4][5][9][10][11] In 2003, Englund wrote about the perspective of Islam in Russia along with the desperate situations of Chernobyl veterans in Ukraine.
It began in 2013 when Jeff Bezos, was extremely impressed with the reporting by a digital journalist, "9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask."
The article received over three million pageviews on WorldViews, a foreign news blog, and correspondents at the Post, were encouraged to participate.
When interviewed in 2015, Englund and his wife both agreed that they missed "the good old days" of reporting; Englund commented further, saying '"It can be satisfying to be quick with a story, but it's not terribly rewarding"..."being enslaved by the Web hugely reduces our ability to explore and dig and do the other acts essential to quality journalism.
The press release describes his new duties at the position as: "He will be tasked with crafting enterprise and accountability stories on a beat that ranges from the oil fields of Saudi Arabia and Russia to the agencies that set U.S. policy.