Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Washington Watchdogs: An Endangered Species?

American Forum
by Dan Raby

When Sylvia Smith, former president of the National Press Club and reporter from Indiana, came to Washington, D.C. in 1989 there were 14 correspondents reporting for local Indiana newspapers. Today there are only two.

The sharp reduction of reporters covering the federal government and its potential negative effects is a major challenge facing the news media, according to leading journalists and media analysts at American University’s American Forum: “Washington Watchdogs: An Endangered Species?”

“The cop has left the beat,” said Wendell Cochran, a professor in the School of Communication and former journalist who moderated the panel.

With decreasing subscription numbers, the closing of numerous major papers and a generation which gets a large part of their news from the internet, newspapers are having to cut cost more and more to survive. One of the casualties is local Washington news bureaus, whose numbers have decreased by half since the mid-80s.

“Individual cities and towns no longer have a Washington presence,” said Suzanne Struglinski, the senior editor of Provider magazine and former president of the Regional Reporters Association. “They are not going to get the detailed information on their delegation specifically that bigger news organizations or a national network will pay attention like a local newspaper will.”

The panelists agreed that the loss of Washington reporters potentially reduces transparency in government. Cochran quoted a colleague who told him, ‘”You can’t let [the legislators] run around Washington without a chaperone.”

Melinda Wittstock, founder and CEO of Capitol News Connection, which distributes news to local National Public Radio stations, described a time when she confronted a representative in Congress about changing his vote to favor a bill after being quoted as opposing it.

“If you’re not there and you can’t witness with your own eyes and ears what’s going on you can’t possibly see the context with which events are unfolding,” Wittstock said. “You can’t tell whether a representative is the same person in Washington as they are back home. Trying to cover Washington from back home [with] a local perspective is next to impossible.”

Struglinski agreed. “You’re not going to have the relationship with the members of Congress if you’re just grabbing a press release and that’s it,” she said. “You have to have a background in it.”

Mark Whitaker, senior vice president and Washington bureau chief of NBC News, pointed out that the national broadcast media is just as troubled as local print journalism.

“[The danger is] more specifically in what you lose when you have fewer veteran reporters who know how to get that confidential information and have fewer news organizations behind them willing to go up to bat,” Whitaker said.

Whitaker acknowledged that the media were partially at fault for their problems. “When the internet first came along we were giving away the content for free. Why then would people pay to get their news online?” he asked. “It used to be that you needed investigative reporters to hunt down documents. Now if you’re really interested you can go and do it yourself.”

Wittstock pointed out that the internet may be the new frontier for news but there’s no real business plan. “We all have to be active and have our contact on the internet now, but how do we monetize the web?” she asked. “There’s a tremendous pressure to put it out there for free. Facebook has something like 200 million users but it can’t make money.”

But it wasn’t all bad news. “The Washington press corps is not so much shrinking as it [is] transforming itself,” said Tyler Marshall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

Marshall pointed to a study he just completed for the Project on Excellence in Journalism that showed although mainstream and local media staff levels are declining in the corps, reporters from niche publications and the foreign press are keeping the presence of the Washington press corps large.

Students in the 200-member audience reacted positively to the forum.

“They were candid about the state of the media and acknowledged the good and bad about a streamlined news business,” said Traci Brooks, a senior majoring in journalism and theatre. “I thought what they said about the internet’s opportunities and problems was really interesting considering that’s probably the future of news reporting.

Shanika Yapa, a sophomore majoring in public communication, said she was interested in the panelists’ career advice.

“The guests were really up front about the problems with blogs and the big news organizations,” she said. “I liked [Struglinski’s] job advice to take a chance with a small publication.”

The next forum sponsored by the School of Communication at American University is entitled, “Are the Media Making Us Dumber?” It will be held on March 31.

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