The Death Of The Insiders

by Stowe Boyd

Jonathan Kaplan, the former Washington reporter for the Portland [Maine] Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram laments his recent firing, and ponders the implications of the loss of "regional reporting", by which he means a reporter in Washington reporting on the legislators from Maine:

[On Capitol Hill, Meeting Less of the Press by Jonathan Kaplan]

[...]

My former employer, the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, reduced its reporting and editing staff through four rounds of layoffs and buyouts. The Blethen family, which has owned the paper for 10 years, has put it up for sale.

Since the newspaper closed its Washington bureau on July 1, it has tried to cover the activities of Maine's congressional delegation in Washington from Maine. While that's bad news for my career, it could be worse news for democracy.

[...]

The biggest losers in these cutbacks, of course, are the citizens of Maine and the other states where newspapers have closed their Washington bureaus. My main gripe is that the loss of regional reporters just gives one more advantage to incumbents seeking reelection. Even in 2006, a year in which a Democratic tide swept Republicans out of office, 94 percent of incumbents in the House were reelected, as were 79 percent of those in the Senate, according to OpenSecrets.org, a nonpartisan Web site that keeps track of election spending and data.

The downsizing in mainstream newspapers does not, of course, spell disaster for the Constitution. We reporters, as much as we might want to think otherwise, are not the last line of defense against the misuse of government power in the republic. These days, people get their news from plenty of other sources, including television, radio and the Internet. So the problem isn't that all those press releases that lawmakers send out will go unchallenged, although they might go unread in standard newsprint.

But readers will miss some nuance simply because there's nobody in the Capitol. They won't know how Sen. Olympia Snowe's eyes light up when she recalls being selected as an intern for the state's Democratic governor in the summer of 1967, even though she considered herself a Republican. They'll probably never learn that, at a press conference in May, just minutes before a vote on a massive farm bill, Collins praised a provision in the measure to close the so-called Enron loophole. She then headed straight to the Senate floor and voted against the bill.

We regional reporters put readers in rooms like that and give them a voice. But we're disappearing fast, and it's not clear who can pick up the slack.

Regional reporting, as defined by Kaplan, is failing for both economic and cultural reasons.

One one hand, the national and international press -- like the NY Times and CNN -- provide those interested in national and international news more than enough about what's happening in Iraq or the Summer Olympics, and no regional paper can keep up economically: the numbers don't work, given people's growing lack of interest in regional papers.

On the cultural side, something more sociological is happening. While a small percentage of the population might want a reporter to follow Senator Olympia Snowe around and report on the minutiae of her day-to-day dealing in Washington, most could care less. Why? Because on the one hand a the growing power of the national/international press has led to people losing the identification of themselves as "Mainiacs" (or whatever the term for residents of Maine is). And not just in Maine.

With increased internal migration of workers, and generations of families bouncing around the country like pinballs, the sense of state-oriented regionalism is dying, if not dead. I never identified myself as a "Massachusettsian" although I lived there for 30+ years: I was a Bostonian. Resident of other metropolitan cities identify in similar ways. I now consider myself a San Franciscan, althoguh I have relative small identification with the State of California.

The reality is that the state boundaries do not represent actual constituencies of people with clearly defined shared interests. The borders are more a reflection of the activities of European explorers and the gradual accretion of western territories into the US by occupation or wars or deals with France, Spain, Russia, and Texas. They have little relevance now, except at the bureaucratic governmental one, like the housing of land records, and what state government gets my tax money.

American's psychological affiliation with place has broken into two pieces, one into a national identity and the other a local affiliation with an economic region, one generally small than the borders of a state.

Localism is trumping regionalism. I care about what is happening at this tip of the pennisula, and the surrounding area of nearby counties. I want a lot of information about that, but what California's senators are doing in DC doesn't seem to be central to that: what Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein are doing seems to be national to me, not local.

Local is about what the Newsome is doing, or the potholes in my street, or the local ordinances about raising chickens.

To me, a reporter writing about DC from DC -- especially one hired to the job as a professional DC political reporter, not sent from Maine to figure it out -- is just another Washington insider, like a lobbyist or a professional politician in their sixth term in Congress. The death of regional reporting is just another sign of the death of insiderism: those close to the seats of power dispatching their insight back to the hicks back in Podunk.

Note that Kaplan is not taking a job in Portland ME, reporting on the potholes and chicken ordinances. He's now a freelance political reporter in DC, hoping (I bet) for a job in the national political press corps. However, since that group is going through the downsizing that global news companies are faced with, he is unlikely to find joy there.

We need a different sort of background to find a home in local media, and a long term Washington political reporter is unlikely to make that transition.