Otterblog

There is a good story in the NY Times today about the decline in statehouse reporters, pegged to the situation in Albany, NY. The story line is predictable. Newspapers are cutting costs and looking at state capital bureaus as one place to save. This is really a print issue. TV stations—save for those in capital markets—have never given a lot of attention to state government news.
This is an unfortunate trend. Less coverage means less oversight. Less oversight means more chance for abuse of power. There are newsletters and blogs and the like that attempt to fill the void, and some of them do a good job, but few approach it with the goal of objectivity.
The situation is not much different in Raleigh. When I covered the legislature in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the press corps was more robust, probably 15-20 journalists. My guess is it’s about a dozen now, maybe (The Journal has one reporter there, down from two two years ago. Prior to his death, my brother-in-law, Art Weissman, was the Trenton bureau chief for the Asbury Park Press in NJ, a state well-known for its “inefficient government,” and I remember him giving me a tour of the place one year. There were probably 40-50 journalists there. Again, no more. There’s still top-quality work being done in statehouses. Just less of it. The holes in the net are bigger and more stuff gets through.
When I think about the interface between technology and journalism and end users, I think of three areas: distribution (how we get the news); aggregation (how the news gets packaged into what we want and what we don’t want) and generation (how news gets created). Technology is really good at the first two, but not so good on the last one, and I don’t think you can repackage the first two into a quality substitute for the third leg of the stool.