Disappearing act: a declining statehouse press corps leaves readers less informed about lawmakers' efforts.

• Author: Smith, Edward

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Declining coverage of the statehouse is one casualty of the rapidly deteriorating newspaper business. There are fewer journalists spending less time writing fewer stories about legislatures than in the past decade.

A recent survey conducted by State Legislatures found a steady erosion in the number of print reporters covering the legislature, the number of newspapers maintaining a capitol bureau and the amount of space in print devoted to news from the statehouse.

Of the papers that have kept a bureau, there have been cuts in staffing and an increase in the number who have gone to part-time coverage. At the same time, there has been steady growth in the number of bloggers covering legislatures, both at newspaper websites and on freestanding blogs.

It's a decline that goes to the heart of how our system of government operates, according to Evan Cornog, associate dean at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and publisher of The Columbia Journalism Review.

"We have a federal system of government whose founders believed power should be kept away from the national government except when it had to be there," he says. "As a result, state governments have a tremendous amount of effect on people's lives. A huge amount of power is concentrated in the states and vastly less energy goes into finding out about that by journalists and citizens."

The most comprehensive census of statehouse reporters is done by the Project on the State of the American Newspaper and reported on in American Journalism Review. In 2003, the project found 524 statehouse reporters covering the 50 state capitols as a full-time beat. The most recent survey, reported on in the April issue of American Journalism Review, found the number had dropped more than 30 percent to 355, with 44 states reporting a net decline in the number of reporters assigned to the capitol.

"The sad truth is statehouse numbers have been dropping since the early '90s," says Tiffany Shackelford, executive director of Capitolbeat, the national association of statehouse reporters. "We're sort of the canary in the coal mine.

But numbers are not the only measure of coverage, she says. "We are also seeing reporters who have been in these states for 20-some years taking buyouts or getting cut and being replaced by 22-year-olds," she says. "These may be talented reporters, but they don't have the institutional knowledge. And the statehouse beat is one of the most complex in the nation."

While it is not clear the reduced coverage has the same effect, closing newspapers does appear to have a negative effect on participation in public life, according to a study published in March by Sam Schulhofer-Wohly and Miguel Garridoz of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. They attempted to gauge what effect closing The Cincinnati Post had on the northern Kentucky suburbs where it was widely circulated. They concluded that closing the paper at the end of 2007 "reduced the number of people voting in elections and the number of candidates for city council, city commission and school board in the Kentucky suburbs, and raised incumbent council and commission members' chances of keeping their jobs."

While the pressure is on to make cuts throughout newsrooms, some top editors still see coverage of the statehouse as a key part of their mission.

"We view statehouse coverage as part of local news, and it is just as important as covering City Hall," says Martin Kaiser, editor of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and vice-president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors. "We have three reporters full time in Madison and have had that for at least eight years."

Kaiser says his newspaper may be unusual and, looking more broadly, thinks the attention given to capitol news is based partly on the state and also on the proximity of the newspaper to the capitol. In Illinois, for example, his experience was that news about Chicago politics and government often overshadowed what happened in Springfield.

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Kaiser says newspapers also face the challenge not only of reporting on state government, but doing it in a way that will attract readers. "There's a struggle over making governmental news matter to people."

BUSINESS IS SHRINKING

There is no question newsrooms are contracting...