Legislature starts with a lot fewer journalists

OLYMPIA — House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler noticed something strange recently: Reporters aren't calling as often, even though the state faces its biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.

"It's really noticeable to me, especially this year," said Kessler, D-Hoquiam, who holds one of the most powerful jobs in the state Legislature and serves as a key source for journalists who cover politics.

The lack of calls has nothing to do with Kessler, or an apathetic news media. There simply aren't as many reporters.

During the past 15 years, the state population has increased by 25 percent and the amount of tax money spent by the state has more than doubled. Yet the number of print, television and radio journalists covering the state Legislature full time has dropped by about 70 percent.

It is a long-term trend that accelerated this decade and finally fell off a cliff this year because of plunging advertising revenue in face of the recession and a changing media landscape.

In 1993, there were 34 journalists covering the Washington state Legislature. By 2007, there were 17. This year, there may be as few as 10 full-time journalists, mostly newspaper reporters.

There are many implications. Alex Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, put it this way: "When reporters leave the state Capitol, the mice play."

"It takes no imagination," Jones said, when "the governor of Illinois was arrested (on corruption charges) ... to understand that state government needs watching very carefully."

That's not to say all politicians are crooks, but even some state lawmakers say journalists are needed to rat out the Legislature on occasion, especially when it comes to the budget.

Lawmakers this year face a nearly $6 billion budget shortfall, which will require deep cuts in spending and possibly spur talk of putting a tax package on the ballot.

"Legislators will get away with things they didn't get away with before," said Rep. Hans Dunshee, D-Snohomish.

The forces at work in Olympia have hit state capitals across the nation. Newspapers are reducing staff or closing bureaus entirely, said Tiffany Shackelford, executive director of Capitolbeat, an association of Capitol reporters and editors.

The Capitol press corps in Connecticut, a state with 3.5 million people, has been reduced to about a dozen reporters, she said. "Everybody else, literally, is gone."

In Florida, most news operations have scaled back, said Dean Ridings, president of the Florida Press Association. "There is probably less than half the number of reporters today than there was 18 months ago," he said.

The decline is due to a number of factors, but the biggest one is money. With the rise of the Web and other information sources, the so-called mainstream media faces growing competition for advertising dollars. Free, online-classified ads have largely eviscerated that key source of revenue for newspapers.

The current recession has accelerated the financial hit.

As a result, some newspapers, including The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., have no plans to send a reporter to Olympia to cover the Legislature next month.

"We just decided, financially, it wasn't in the cards," said editor Lou Brancaccio.

Others newspapers have reduced their staffs. The News Tribune of Tacoma had two reporters covering the Legislature but now has one. The Seattle Times, which until recently had three people based in Olympia, has one full-time reporter there.

The Associated Press office at the state Capitol keeps a printout with mugshots of reporters who recently covered the Legislature pinned to a wall. They mark off each reporter who leaves. Seven faces are now covered with smiley-face stickers.

The public-relations staff employed by state lawmakers and government agencies, many of whom are former journalists, vastly outnumber the reporters in Olympia who call them for information.

The House Democratic caucus alone has 12 people on its public-relations staff. Melinda McCrady, the communications director, said she's noticed that instead of getting calls from statehouse reporters based in Olympia, they're getting more inquiries from reporters located in main newsrooms.

They don't have the background of people like Dave Ammons, a former Associated Press reporter who covered the Legislature for 37 years before leaving earlier this year for a communications job with the secretary of state's office.

"They are a lot less informed. They don't know what's going on," McCrady said.

TVW, a nonprofit television station largely funded by the state, has helped fill some of the void. Founded in 1993, the station provides live and archived coverage of the state Legislature, as well as the state Supreme Court, government agencies and panels. However, it is mostly raw, unfiltered footage.

Several political blogs also provide commentary and some coverage of state government issues.

Jones, at Harvard, said he's not worried as much about the future of printed newspapers as he is about the kind of reporting they've been able to finance.

"I don't see that citizen journalism or blogging or these new sort of marginal Web institutions being able to take the place of well-funded, profitable and committed news organizations," he said.

"It may be fine to have someone young, to have a fire lit and be ambitious and go out and do reporting, but that is not going to be a sustaining force, a replacement for what is rapidly disappearing," he said.

Andrew Garber: 360-236-8266 or agarber@seattletimes.com

Information in this article, originally published December 19, 2009, was corrected January 9, 2009. A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that two reporters were left at the Connecticut capital, rather than about a dozen of reporters.