140 characters of news: at statehouses, the press corps continues to shrink and change in unexpected ways and with uncertain consequences.

• Author: Weiss, Suzanne
• Position: LEGISLATURES

Legislators who have been around a while remember when statehouse pressrooms were beehives of activity, staffed full time and year-round by seasoned journalists who covered their beat "like a blanket," as editors like to say.

How things have changed.

Over the past dozen years, the decline of newspapers and the rise of digital platforms have led to what the American Journalism Review recently called "a staggering loss of reporting firepower at America's state capitals."

Today's statehouse press corps not only is significantly smaller than it was a decade ago, but also has morphed into a patchwork of traditional and nontraditional reporters--the latter ranging from self-employed bloggers to college students to ideological activists. The result has been a major shift in the breadth, depth and tone of state government coverage.

Drone Media

Tennessee Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris (R), a 15-year legislative veteran, laments that many statehouse reporters these days lack experience and institutional knowledge. He refers to their increasing reliance on video and audio feeds from the capitol, rather than reporting gathered in person, as "drone media."

"Reporters sit in their newsrooms or at home or wherever, watching these feeds. But something is lost with the lack of eye contact, not being able to pick up on body language or conversations at the back of the chamber--that kind of thing," he says. "You lose the feel of a room."

Norris worries about the consequences of declining statehouse coverage. "In politics, the press is a very important tool in building public consensus," he says. "But today I see much less commitment from the media to developing issues in a way that people understand. I realize that takes a lot of work, but it's vital to having an educated and engaged public."

Massachusetts Senate President Stan Rosenberg (D), a 28-year legislative veteran, says he used to get calls from capitol bureau reporters nearly every day and even on weekends during sessions. "These were conversations digging deeply into policy issues, and they gave me the chance to really get across what I was doing and what I was thinking," he recalls.

Nowadays, such calls are few and far between--a couple of times a month, Rosenberg says--and the media coverage he gets is more likely to focus on "some charity event I attended or things like my interest in cooking. There's been a big change in what reporters seem to think people want to read and hear about."

Alan Calandro, director of the Connecticut General Assembly's Office of Fiscal Analysis, says he has seen a decline in the quality of statehouse coverage over his 25 years as a legislative staffer, and that it's most evident when it comes to complex topics like budgeting.

"It's not so much that reporters get things wrong--although there's some of that--but their reporting doesn't capture the nuances of issues," Calandro says. "And that leads to a lot of misinformation out there."

Reporters often don't realize that they can avail themselves of legislative support functions such as research, fiscal analysis and bill drafting, he says. And when they do come knocking, "they are somewhat sheepish about asking questions. That's why I go out of my way to help them out, so they can do a better job."

Democracy 'Imperiled'

Phill Brooks, director of the state government reporting program at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, says, "The media no longer care about the details of the policy issues being debated. That's been the biggest change--the focus on outcomes more than process. By the time a bill is gathering momentum, it's often too late for people to get in touch with their legislators, to voice their opinions and to...