WASHINGTON 2002
'Cutting furthest from the Heart'
Who needs a reporter in D.C.?
They buried the lead in a grilled tuna sandwich. First there was chitchat about semi-pro basketball, and the quirky state congressional delegation. It wasn’t until the end of the meal that they got to the news. “The real reason you’re here,” the managing editor said after the waitress brought coffee, “is we’ve decided to close the Washington bureau.”
I glanced from the managing editor to the man at my left, my city editor for more than a decade. One of them was sure to smile, confirming the joke. After all, I was in Charleston to discuss a story in progress, not the prospect of a disappearing job. No one smiled.
The Charleston, South Carolina, Post and Courier has had Washington correspondents since 1977, well before I took over in 1989. Would one of the state’s top three papers actually abandon Washington in ninety-nine-year-old Strom Thurmond’s last year as a senator? They said something about “cutting furthest from the heart,” and, “Nothing to do with you, Steve, it’s the economy.”
Over the last decade or so, mostly in the name of saving money (but for other reasons, too) a number of regional papers from around the country have shuttered their D.C. bureaus or cut bureau staff. Definitive numbers are elusive, but anecdotal evidence is abundant. In the last five years alone the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Akron, Ohio, Beacon Journal, and The Greenville (South Carolina) News have abandoned the Beltway; The Huntsville (Alabama) Times chose not to replace its D.C. reporter who left to start a family; the Columbus, Georgia, Ledger-Enquirer cut its D.C. reporter — which it had shared with another paper — and created a new position back home; in 1990, The Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville vacated D.C. to save money, then briefly returned last year only to have its lone Washington reporter quit for a better-paying job. Lee Davidson, the capital correspondent for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City for fifteen years, says when he began, five other Utah newspapers had reporters in D.C. Until recently, he was the only one left. (The Gannett-owned St. George Spectrum now shares a Washington reporter with papers in Honolulu and Guam, and The Salt Lake Tribune will soon add a D.C. reporter.)
So what, right? With all the wire coverage of the nation’s capital, what is really lost when these small bureaus close?
This turns out to be a matter of some debate. Diane McFarlin, publisher of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and current president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, considers regional reporting from Washington a staple of local coverage. A community correspondent, she says, “will ferret out actions or trends that might not have broad enough implications to interest the national press corps, but that are especially relevant to readers back home.”
McFarlin, though, wasn’t able to spare her D.C. bureau from the budget ax. The New York Times Regional Newspaper Group, which owns McFarlin’s paper, recently dropped one of its two Washington reporters.
Tim McGuire, McFarlin’s predecessor at ASNE and a former editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, says his newspaper maintain its three-person Washington bureau despite budget pressure. This investment pays off, McGuire says, both in the quality of day-to-day coverage and when a big story — like September 11 — breaks. The paper’s D.C. reporters broke several stories on the investigation of the alleged terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, including pieces on the warnings that flight school officials in Minnesota sent to the FBI.
Not everyone, though, shares the conviction that a D.C. bureau makes sense for regional papers. Amanda Bennett, editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, says that too often Washington jobs are filled with “high-end” reporters doing routine stories.
Philip Meyer, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a D.C. correspondent for the Beacon Journal in the 1960s, says that today’s communication technology reduces the need for Washington bureaus. “With e-mails, handouts, and committee testimony on the Internet, plus cheap long-distance calls, having face time with the congressman and staff is less important.”
True enough, but the Post and Courier minus a Washington reporter would never have had hundreds of customized D.C. stories it sent me there to find. Like the one on how Lindsey Graham, one of South Carolina’s congressmen, used the Clinton impeachment trial to build himself into Strom Thurmond’s heir apparent; or the one about the young widow of a Charleston-based Air Force pilot killed in a mid-air collision who came to D.C. and didn’t leave until Congress made the military build safer cargo jets.
Should Thurmond, the nation’s oldest and longest-serving senator, keel over today while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, Post and Courier readers would get either a second-hand story pieced together from home, or wire reports.
Abandoning the nation’s capital to the competition, incidentally, saves the Post and Courier a reporter’s salary, a phone bill, and access to a D.C. daybook service — together about $85,000.
“It was purely economics,” says Larry Tarleton, the Post and Courier’s publisher, of the decision to close the bureau. “The Thurmond situation made the decision more difficult. I’m sure we’re missing some updates and anecdotes on his condition.”
And a whole lot more.
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